She looked like a glorious, slender boy in the riding breeches and puttees she had thought appropriate for the adventure.

THE HIGHFLYERS

By CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND

Author of

“The Source,” “The Hidden Spring,”

“Sudden Jim,” etc.

WITH FRONTISPIECE

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with Harper & Brothers

The Highflyers

Printed in the United States of America

THE HIGHFLYERS

CHAPTER I

Fred la Mothe was speaking. After a certain number of beverages composed of Scotch whisky, imported soda, and a cube of ice, it was a matter of comparative ease for him to exhibit a notable fluency. After two o’clock in the afternoon Fred was generally fluent.

“‘’Tain’t safe,’ I says to him. And the wind was blowin’ enough to lift the hair out of your head. ‘I wouldn’t go up in the thing for the price of it,’ I says, ‘and, besides, you’re seein’ two of it. Bad enough drivin’ a car when you’re lit up,’ I says, ‘but what these flyin’ machines want is a still day and a man that’s cold sober. You just let it rest on its little perch in the bird-cage.’”

Fred refreshed his parched throat while his four companions waited for the conclusion of the tale. “‘You’ll bust your neck,’ I told him.

“‘Ten to one,’ says he, ‘I round Windmill Point Light and come back without bustin’ my neck. Even money I make it without bustin’ anything,’ says he.

“‘Dinner for four at the Tuller to-night that the least you bust is a leg,’ I says, and the wind whipped the hat off my head and whirled it into a tree.”

Fred stopped, evidently mourning the loss of his hat.

“Well,” said Will Kraemer, impatiently, “what happened? Did he go up?”

“Him?... I paid for that dinner, but, b’lieve me, there were times when I thought I’d have to collect from his estate. Ever see a leaf blowing around in a gale? Well, that’s how he looked out over the lake. Just boundin’ and twirlin’ and twistin’, but he went the distance and came back and landed safe. Got out of the dingus just like he was gettin’ off a Pullman. Patted the thing on the wing like it was a pet chicken. ‘Let’s drive down to the Pontchartrain,’ he says. ‘Likely the crowd’s there.’ Not another darn word. Just that.”

“Trouble with Potter Waite,” said Tom Watts, “is that he just naturally don’t give a damn. If he’s going to pull something he’d as lief pull it in the middle of Woodward Avenue at noon by the village clock as to pull it on the Six Mile Road at midnight.”

“No pussy-footin’ for him,” said Jack Eldredge. “My old man was talking about him the other night. Day after he cleaned up those two taxi-drivers out here in front. ‘Don’t let me hear of you running around with that young Waite,’ he says. ‘He’s a bad actor. You keep off him.’”

“He’s a life-saver,” Fred La Mothe joined in. “When dad lights into me I just mention Potter, and dad forgets me entirely. You ought to hear dad when he really gets to going on Potter.”

“I’m no Sunday-school boy—” said Brick O’Mera.

“Do tell,” gibed Eldredge.

“—but I’ll say Potter is crowdin’ the mourners. I wouldn’t follow his trail a week steady.”

The others waggled their heads acquiescently. Even to their minds Potter Waite traveled at too high speed and with too little thought of public opinion. About that table sat five young men who were as much a result of a condition as outlying subdivisions are the result of a local boom. Of them all, La Mothe came from a family which had known moderate wealth for generations, but it had grown swiftly, unbelievably, during the past few wonderful years, to a great fortune. Of the rest, Kraemer and O’Mera were the sons of machinists who, a dozen years before, would have considered carefully before giving their sons fifteen cents to sit in the gallery at the old Whitney Opera House to see sawmill and pile-driver and fire-engine drama. The automobile had caught them up and poured millions into their laps. Eldredge was the son of a bookkeeper who, fifteen years ago, had drawn fifty dollars at the end of each month for his services. For every dollar of that monthly salary he could now show a million. Watts was the son of a lawyer whom sheer good luck had lifted from a practice consisting of the collection of small debts, and made a stockholder in and adviser to a gigantic automobile concern. And these boys were the sons of those swiftly gotten millions. They had forgotten the old days, just as Detroit, their home city, had forgotten its old drowsiness, its mid-Western quietness and conservatism.

One might compare Detroit to a demure village girl, pleasing, beautiful, growing up with no other thought than to become a wife and mother, when, by chance, some great impresario hears her singing about her work and it is discovered that she has one of the world’s rarest voices. From her the old things and the old thoughts and the old habits of life are gone forever. The world pours wealth and admiration at her feet and her name rings from continent to continent. So with the lovely old city, straggling along the shores of that inland strait. She has become a prima donna among cities. The old identity is gone, replaced by something else, less homely, but mightier, grander. Her population, which, within the memory of boys not out of high-school, numbered less than three hundred thousand souls, was now reported to be thrice that, and, by the optimistic, even more. Her wealth has not doubled or trebled, but multiplied by an unbelievable figure, and she has spent it with unbelievable lavishness.

Where once were cobblestone pavements and horse-cars are countless swarms of automobiles; where once were meadows, pastures, wood-lots, are tremendous plants employing armies of men, covering scores of acres, turning out annual products which bring to the city hundreds of millions of dollars. In the history of the world no city has come into such a fortune as Detroit, nor has there been such universal prosperity, not to employer alone, but to employees, and to the least of employees. It seemed as if the day had arrived when one asked, not where he should get money, but what he should do with his money. So Detroit spent! It built magnificent hotels; it created palaces for its millionaires, and miles upon miles of homes—luxurious, costly homes for those whose handsome salaries passed the dreams of their youth, or whose fortunes, built up by contact with the trade of purveying automobiles to an eager world, had not even been hoped for ten years before. Even the laborer had his home. Why not, when one manufacturer paid to the man who swept his floors the minimum wage of five dollars a day?

That was before the war, before a solemn covenant became a scrap of paper and the world fell sick of its most horrible disease. Then Detroit was rich, was spending lavishly but not insanely. With the coming of war there was a halt, a fright, a retrenchment, a hesitation, for no man knew what the next day might bring. But as the next day brought no disaster, as it became apparent that the coming days were to bring something quite different from disaster, Detroit went ahead gaily.

Then came strangers from abroad, speaking other languages than ours, and men began to whisper that this plant had a ten-million-dollar contract from Russia for shrapnel fuses; this other plant a twenty-million-dollar contract for trucks; this other a fabulous arrangement for manufacturing this or that bit of the devil’s prescription for slaughtering men—and the whispers proved true.

The automobile brought amazingly sudden wealth; munition manufacture added to it with a blinding flash—and Detroit came to know what spending was.

These five young men, sitting in mid-afternoon in the Hotel Pontchartrain bar, were a part of all this; their life was the result of it; the thoughts, or lack of thoughts, in their minds, derived from it inevitably, remorselessly. They were castaways thrown up in a barroom by a golden flood.

To four of them a nickel for candy had been an event; now, without mental anguish, each of them could sign a dinner check which stretched to three figures, or buy a runabout or a yacht, or afford the luxury of acquaintance with the young woman who stood fourth from the end in the front row.

Let them not be chided too harshly. The fault was not theirs wholly, but was the inevitable result of their environment. They played at work, drew salaries—but could spend their afternoons in the Pontchartrain, in the Tuller, on the links or at thé dansant. They knew no responsibility to man, felt but a hazy responsibility to God, and as for their country, they had never thought about its existence.

They talked of the war, were pro-Ally with the exception of Kraemer, whom they baited when the fit was on them. Kraemer had been born on Brady Street. His grandfather was a ’forty-eighter. It was natural that he should see eye to eye with the land from which he derived his blood. Of them all, he alone took the war with seriousness, so they baited him at times, and he raged for their amusement.

They began the sport now.

“If the Kaiser only had the grand duke,” said La Mothe, “he might stand some show. Look what he’s done and what he had to do it with! I don’t figure it’ll last much longer. Everybody’s lickin’ Germany.”

Kraemer banged the table. “You’ll see,” he said, passionately. “The war would be over now if it wasn’t for the neutrality of the United States. This country’s just prolonging the agony. If it wasn’t for the munitions the Allies get from here, we’d be in Paris and London and St. Petersburg. Devil of a neutrality, ain’t it? Look here....”

“Rats!” said O’Mera. “Where’s Potter, anyhow?”

“Haven’t seen him to-day. Ought to be driftin’ in.”

“He’s over at police headquarters,” said a new voice, and Tom Randall beckoned a waiter and sat down at the table.

“Pinched again?” came in chorus.

“No, but he’ll probably get himself pinched before he’s through with it. Know the von Essen girl?”

“Hildegarde, you mean? Sassy one? Swiftest flapper that ever flapped?”

“That’s the darlin’. Well, she drives that runabout of hers down Jefferson again, doin’ nothin’ less than forty-five and makin’ real time in spots. Seems she’s been fined pretty average regular. Well, traffic cop gets her and makes her haul up to the curb and crawls right in beside her. Uh-huh. And off they go to the station, her lookin’ like she could bite off the steerin’-wheel. Well, Potter and I are comin’ along in his car, and we see the excitement and tag after. You know Potter?”

“We do!”

“‘It’s that von Essen kid, isn’t it?’ he says to me, and I agree with him. ‘She’s been caught too regular,’ he says. ‘They’ll be nasty. Better trail along and see if we can help out.’ So we did. Got to the station simultaneous and adjacent to them, and out jumps Potter.

“‘Afternoon, Miss von Essen,’ says he.

“‘Mr. Waite,’ she says, cool as a bisque tortoni.

“‘Pinched?’ says he.

“‘Ask him,’ she says, and jerks her head toward the cop, who is clambering down.

“‘She is,’ says the cop, ‘and this time she gits what’s comin’ to her. She been a dam’ nuisance,’ he says, ‘and this here time I’m goin’ to put her over the jumps. Git out and git inside,’ he says to her.

“Well, Potter sort of edged up to the cop and looks him over and says, ‘I don’t really see why this young lady has to go inside. You can make your complaint, and that about ends your usefulness.’

“‘She stays,’ says the cop, ‘and if I got anything to say about it, she sleeps on a plank.’

“‘You wouldn’t care to do that, would you, Miss von Essen?’ says Potter, with that grin of his, and I made ready to duck, because when he grins that way—”

“We know,” said the boys.

“‘Now you listen to reason,’ says Potter. ‘A police station is no place for a young lady. It doesn’t smell pleasantly. So she doesn’t go in. If bail’s necessary or if anything’s necessary, I’m here for that. But omit the stern policeman part of it.’

“‘Git out and come in,’ says the cop to the girl.

“‘You and I are going in, friend,’ says Potter, and he took hold of the policeman’s arm. ‘We’ll fix this up—not the young lady. Come on,’ says Potter, with his left fist all doubled up and ready.

“The cop knew Potter, so they parleyed, and then they walked under the porch—you know the entrance to the station—and in a couple of minutes out comes Potter, looking sort of sneering and shoving a roll of bills into his pocket.

“‘Seems there was some mistake,’ he says to Miss von Essen. ‘It wasn’t you who broke the speed ordinance; it was I. I’ve arranged the mistake with the officer. Now, for cat’s sake, cut it out. You’ll be breaking into print good one of these days, and there’ll be the devil to pay ... or breaking your neck. You’ll get yourself talked about if you don’t ease off some.’ And,” said Randall, “he hardly knows the girl. Some line of talk for Potter to ladle out!”

“What did she say?”

“Her eyes just glittered at him. She’s a handsome little cat, but I’ll bet she can scratch. ‘Coming from you,’ she says, ‘that advice is thrilling.’ Her engine was still running. She slammed into gear, stepped on the gas, and shot over to Randolph Street.

“Potter looked after her and chuckled. ‘Promising kid,’ he said. ‘You chase along, Tom. They want me inside.’ So here I am. Guess he can take care of himself.”

“Here he comes,” said La Mothe. “Didn’t get locked up, anyhow.”

A tall young man who did not need padding in the shoulders of his coat was making his way between the tables. He wore a plaid cap jauntily on his yellow hair. He was not handsome, but at first glance one was apt to call him handsome—if he were in good humor. You liked his face, except at times when he was alone, or thoughtful. Then it distressed you, for you could not make out the meaning of its expression. Then his blue eyes, which were twinkling now, looked dark and brooding. He had a way of looking dissatisfied—and something worse, more disquieting—something not to be defined. Ordinarily his face was such as to draw men to him, even older men who quite disliked him and used his mode of life as a text for dissertations on what the young man of to-day was coming to.

One thing might be said with safety—he possessed personality. When he was one of a group he dominated it. He was not a boy to leave out of the reckoning.... When one of his “fits,” as his friends called them, was dark upon him, even those who knew him best and regarded themselves as closest to him were a bit uneasy in his company. The most hardy and reckless of them was moved at such times to go away from there, for Potter Waite usually set out on some mad enterprise when that mood was on him. He would set a pace few cared to follow.

“You never know what he’s thinking about,” Kraemer said, frequently. It was true. But you did not know that he was thinking, and that he could think. Also he never followed, he led. For him consequences did not exist. If he set out to do a thing, he did it, and let consequences take care of themselves. And, as the boys complained, he went his reprehensible way with a brass band. The idea of concealing his escapades seemed not to occur to him.

“What’ll you have?” called Randall, whose waiter had come to him.

“A stein, a quart of Scotch, and a bottle of soda,” said Potter.

“What’s that, sir?” said the waiter.

“Deliver it as ordered,” said Potter, with a boyish smile that got him quicker and better service than other men’s tips.

The waiter obeyed and the boys watched with interest. Potter poured a generous half-pint into the stein upon the ice, and filled the stone mug with soda.

“I’m goin’ to git,” said Jack Eldredge. “Somethin’s goin’ to bust loose around here.”

Potter sat back comfortably and sipped from his stein. He appeared unconscious that, from other tables, glances were directed toward him, and that men standing at the bar mentioned his name and pointed him out to companions. He began chatting pleasantly.

“Not pinched, eh?” asked Randall.

“Suppose I’ll get mine in the morning,” Potter said, without interest.

“I’d ’a’ let her take her medicine,” Randall said. “It wasn’t any of your funeral.... Didn’t even say thank you.”

Potter looked at him musingly. “That was the best part of it,” he said, presently. “Sort of proves she’s being natural; not four-flushing like some of these girls. They’d have burbled and kissed my hand—stepped out of character, you know. She didn’t.”

A boy came into the room with an armful of papers. What he called could not be heard distinctly above the din of the place. Potter raised his hand and the boy threw a paper before him. The young man glanced at it, seemed to stiffen. He sat back in his chair while the others watched him, arrested by something in his manner, something portentous.

He stood up and looked from one to the other of them. Then he laid down the paper slowly.

“The Lusitania has been torpedoed,” he said, in a quiet voice, “without warning. Hundreds of Americans are lost—women and children.” He stopped and repeated the last words. “Women and children.” For a moment he stood motionless.... “It means war,” he said.

Every eye was on him. He held them. He stopped them as if they had been so many clocks with their hands pointing to this fateful hour. He made them feel the event.

Nobody spoke. Potter turned very slowly and surveyed the room, then, still very slowly, he walked out of the room without a word or a nod. His stein was left, scarcely touched, before his chair.

CHAPTER II

Potter Waite stood a moment at the curb beside his car, looking at the heart of this great new city. At his right, Cadillac Square stretched broadly away to the County Building’s square tower. Within his memory this handsome space had been a public market, unsightly, evil of odor, reeking with decaying vegetables and the refuse of the meat-stalls. To-day it was overcrowded with parked automobiles. At his left opened the Campus Martius, bisected by the magnificent width of Woodward Avenue. There, on its little irregular plot, squatted the City Hall, shabby, slatternly, forbidding. It seemed, against the background, the palisade, of upreaching sky-scrapers of terra-cotta and brick, to typify that thing we tolerate as municipal government. As was the shabby building to its clean, its magnificent, neighbors, so was the thing it contained—the government of a great city—to the governments of private enterprises which had made that city a place to excite the envious admiration of her sister municipalities.

Potter frowned at the thought. The huge machine of government was made up of such parts, of common councils, of mayors, of state legislatures, of national legislatures, differing only in degree, but wrought of kindred materials. It was this machine with which the country would make war.

“It won’t work,” Potter said to himself. “It hasn’t the stroke or the bore....”

He stood still looking at the teeming Campus, following its currents and cross-currents and eddies with eyes darkened by thought. It was a current worthy to pass between magnificent banks. The sidewalks eddied with never-motionless men and women; with human beings whose errands hurried them on. Potter studied them with interest. Their faces were mobile, alert, intelligent, forceful. There was a capability about each individual; there was something distinct about each atom in the crowd.... Here, after all, was the great machine of government. Here was that from which government derived; here was that which would make war, which would fight the war. Walking down that street was a potential army, and the mothers of a potential army.

It was these who had made possible, who had created, the terra-cotta sky-scrapers; it was these who had made possible that marvelous procession of automobiles which taxed the width of Woodward Avenue; it was these who had made possible the building up of that miracle of industrial life that stretched around the town like fortifications around some European city—but fortifications holding the city safe, not from a foreign invader, but from an economic invader. Factory-fortresses preserving the prosperity of the town.

He continued to eye the crowd, and his eyes became less deep and dark. He raised his head without knowing that he raised it. A feeling of pride was upon him.

“Here’s the thing—the real thing,” he said within himself. “This is the machine; the stroke is there and the bore is there ... if they can be made to see and to understand.”

Potter stepped into his car and drove out Woodward Avenue, and thence down a side-street to that mammoth, unbelievable mass of buildings which all the world, through advertisements, would recognize as the plant of the Waite Motor Car Company. Since the day the first brick was laid, a dozen years before, building had never ceased. The plant had never caught up with itself, had never been able to produce the number of automobiles required of it by the public. As far as the eye reached were clean, splendid structures; the ragged outline at the end, dimly seen, was caused by steel not yet covered by brick, by brick walls rising to wall in new space in which to manufacture yet more thousands of the Waite motor-car.

To all this, to this concrete, visible, tangible fortune, Potter Waite was sole heir. It was not like wealth in stocks, bonds, securities. It was not in promises to pay, in paper standing for something more substantial. It was there. It could be beheld in the mass. Perhaps a hundred millions of dollars actually reared themselves in brick and steel, in splendid, efficient machinery. Potter had grown up with it, was accustomed to it. Unlike the casual passer-by, he was not awed by it.

He leaped from his car and ran up the broad flight of stairs leading to the offices on the second floor.

“Dad in?” he flung at the man who sat behind the information-desk.

“Yes, but he’s occupied, Mr. Waite. I shouldn’t go in.”

Potter strode past. The man rose as though to call him back, and then sat down with a shrug. Potter flung open the door of his father’s office, flung himself through it.

“Dad, have you heard?” he said, abruptly.

Fabius Waite looked up, frowned. “I’m busy. Weren’t you told?” he said.

Potter glanced at the other occupants of the room; recognized Senator Marvel, did not recognize the other. He nodded to the Senator.

“The Germans have torpedoed the Lusitania,” he said. “It was without warning. More than a hundred Americans drowned—women and children ... like rats,” he finished.

The Senator was on his feet. The news had been a sudden, bewildering blow to him. “What’s that? Are you sure? Where did you get it?”

Potter threw a paper on the desk over which the Senator and the stranger crouched with manifest excitement. Not so Fabius Waite. He did not glance at the paper, nor did he seem moved. His broad, clean-shaven, patrician face showed no emotion except, perhaps, a shade of irritation at the others’ reception of the tidings. Potter said to himself that his father would sit outwardly unmoved, unruffled, not in the least disarranged mentally, if word were brought him that the dissolution of the universe had commenced. It was true. Fabius Waite would study the information and determine his course of action before he gave a sign that the most sharp-eyed might read.

“My God!” exclaimed the man whom Potter did not know.

“What’ll it mean?... What will it mean?” the Senator asked, in an awed, frightened voice.

“What can it mean but war?” Potter said.

His father merely glanced at him, not contemptuously, not rebukingly, in fact, not as if Potter were a human being at all, but as if he were some piece of the room’s furniture to which attention had been called.

“When you men are through scrambling over that paper,” he said, quietly, “I’ll look at it myself.” He did not stretch out his hand for the paper, did not seem to suggest that it be given to him, but simply stated a fact. Potter came near to smiling at the alacrity with which Senator and business man abandoned the news sheet and pressed it upon his father. The Senator was a big man in Washington and in Michigan, Potter knew. The stranger looked like a man of importance, yet Fabius Waite dominated them, made their personalities colorless by the simple fact of his presence. He merely sat there—and they were dwarfs beside him.

“The people,” said the Senator, “there’ll be no holding them back. They’ll sweep us into war—as they did with Spain.”

“I heard there were munitions shipped on the Lusitania,” said the stranger.

Fabius Waite paid not the minutest attention to them, but read calmly, appraisingly, from beginning to end what the paper told of the sinking of the Lusitania. When he was done he folded the paper neatly and laid it on his desk.

“There were munitions,” said the Senator, “and people were warned by advertisements in the paper to keep off that boat.”

“What’s the difference?” Potter demanded. “Are we going to let them murder our citizens like this—and put up such an excuse as that?”

“Citizens had no business on the boat,” said the stranger. “They brought it on themselves.”

“There’s got to be war,” said Potter, his eyes traveling uncertainly from Senator to business man—to his father, where they remained. “There’s no other way. What else can be done about such a thing?”

“For one thing,” said Fabius Waite, coolly, “we can stop jabbering and think about it.... You especially, Potter. If you must wag your tongue, go back to the Pontchartrain bar and wag it for the benefit of the gang of loafers you train with.... Senator, what suggests itself to you?”

“I must get to Washington. The Senate doesn’t want war, I can vouch for that.... But the people.... Perhaps the President can hold them.”

“I gather from your words that he’ll be willing to try?”

“He’s the last man in the country to want war.... There’ll be no war. Those German dunder-heads! Do they want to pull the whole world down about their ears?”

“They’re fools,” said the stranger.

“We won’t argue about their wisdom. Whether they were wise or foolish, they seem to have sunk the Lusitania.” Fabius Waite paused. “And when all’s said and done it won’t be the Senate nor the President nor business which determines what we will do about it. It’s the people who will make up their minds. Don’t lose sight of that.”

“Public opinion can be molded.”

“For a while and to an extent.... I believe this thing can be handled so that nothing will come of it. It will take careful handling. You agree with me, do you not, Senator, that neither the people nor the business of the Middle West want war?”

“Certainly I do.”

“I have no doubt you will intimate to the President that you have grave doubts if the Middle West will follow him into war—will back him up in any belligerent attitude he may have in mind to assume.” Fabius Waite’s eyes were on the Senator’s face, and none could tell what thoughts stirred behind them. He did not order, did not direct, did not suggest, but he was imposing his will on this imposing member of an august body as surely and as relentlessly as if he held a revolver at the Senator’s head.

“I feel it my duty to intimate as much to him,” said the Senator.

“There must, of course, be a protest,” said Fabius White. “News that the President is preparing a note to the German government will hold the people in check. I incline to believe they will wait for it to see what the President thinks.... If it should take time to prepare, so much the better. It would give the country time to cool off.”

“The people have seen what war means,” said the Senator. “They’ve seen Belgium and France.... They’ve no stomach for a dose like that. Handle this thing right—let them get over the first shock of it—and the excitement will die down. The people are sheep.... Yes, you’re perfectly right about delay.”

Potter had hurried to his father, his soul a flame of emotion. The flame was being quenched. The boy stood silent, looking from one to the other of these men, hurt, amazed. Just why he had come or what he had expected his father to do he did not know. Impulse had brought him. The word patriotism was not in his vocabulary, as it was not in the vocabularies of millions of Americans on that seventh day of May. But some spring had been touched, something had been set in motion by the news of that atrocity which would be heralded from one end to the other of the Germanic Empire as a splendid feat of arms. The thing was wrong: the evil of it had seared through to the uneasy soul of the boy and had set afoot within him something which he did not understand as yet.... He was not able now to say, “Civis Americanus sum.”

It was not reason that had brought him. It was no conscious surge of loyalty to his country. It was something—something he felt to be right. Perhaps there was a tinge of adventure in it; perhaps his youth heard the rolling of martial drums and saw the unfurling of flags of war.... But he was right and these men were wrong. That he knew.

He wondered at the men. There had been no word of sympathy for the dead; there had been no cry of anger wrung from them by this affront to the honor of the nation; there had been but one thought—dollars. Business came first. The prosperity of dollars and cents filled their minds to the exclusion of all other prosperities. Even the Senator, servant and representative of the people, was not serving and representing the people. He, too, saw only the effect of this thing on business.

“Does everybody think like this?” Potter wondered. It might be so. His friends at the table in the Pontchartrain bar had been surprised at the news, but he considered their actions those of men who had not been shocked or those of men enraged. Perhaps they, too, were of one mind with his father.... Perhaps all the people were of that mind. Perhaps that was the sort of people the American nation had grown to be....

“Dad,” he said, “if Mother had been on board—”

“She wasn’t,” said Fabius Waite. “Senator, this is mighty ticklish, and it will grow more ticklish. This one act can be smoothed over, but many recurrences of it cannot be smoothed over. Isn’t there some machinery to set afoot forbidding American citizens to cross the ocean? That would do it.”

“I wouldn’t care to introduce such a resolution,” said the Senator, “but probably somebody can be got to do it.”

“We’ve a right to travel,” Potter said, hotly. “Didn’t we fight a war about that once? You don’t mean to say, Dad, that you actually would have this country admit that it was afraid to claim its rights.... The world would laugh at us.”

“Let it,” said his father. “Another year or two of this war and this nation will top them all. We’ll be the financial rulers of the world. We’re getting there now, and nothing must happen to set us back.”

“And the world will despise us,” Potter said, bitterly. He was beginning to see more clearly now. He paused. This attitude of mind he was witnessing could not be common to all the people. He would not believe it. “Dad, think bigger. You men are wrong. You can’t head this off. It means war.... It’s got to mean war. And war means armies and cannon and shell—and aeroplanes. We’ve got to have them all. Think, Dad, and you’ll realize it.... Take a telegraph blank, Dad, and write the President. You can help with this plant; every other plant like it can help. Wire the President that this plant is at the disposal of the country for any use the country can put it to.... Tell him you’re with him. Tell him you can make guns or shrapnel-cases or motors for him as well as for England or France or Russia—as you are making them.... And aeroplanes. We’ll need thousands of them.... Give that job to me, Dad. I know aeroplanes—”

“You know mixed drinks and chorus girls and traffic cops,” his father snorted.

“You won’t do it?”

“Don’t be a fool.”

Potter turned and walked out of the room. He stopped at the information-desk. Here sat a man who worked for wages, a common citizen. Here sat the sort of man who made up the bulk of that crowd he had watched on Woodward Avenue.

“Dickson,” he said, “the Germans have sunk the Lusitania and killed a hundred Americans.”

“Awful, wasn’t it? I just heard.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

“Why—we’ll make ’em pay for it, that’s what. We’ll collect damages, millions of dollars.”

“Money?” said Potter.

“You bet, Mr. Waite. Money.”

“Is that all? Will that satisfy you?”

“Isn’t that enough?” asked Dickson, in real surprise. “What more can anybody ask?”

“You don’t want to fight? You don’t think it means war?”

“Great heavens, no! War!... We don’t want any of that in ours. I guess this country won’t mix in any wars. We’ve been seeing what war means. Anyhow, what should we fight for? England and the Allies are going to lick Germany, aren’t they? Well, let them.”

Potter turned on his heel. He had his answer.

Once more he got into his car and whirled down-town. Once more he stopped before the Pontchartrain and entered the bar. His friends were not there, but he sat down at a table and ordered a drink; he ordered another drink—and another....

His eyes were dark and brooding; the restless urge to recklessness was upon him—that smoldering fire which had made him a young man to be looked upon askance by the respectable. His face was set—and he drank.... Fred La Mothe came through the revolving door, saw Potter, studied his face and his attitude for a moment, and then quietly withdrew. He knew the signs, and had no desire to be in Potter’s company from that hour on.

He sat alone at his table, brooding, drinking from time to time. He felt no hunger, did not arise to eat. The lights came on and still he sat. The room was thronged with the early-evening crowd, and Potter glowered at them—and ordered other drinks.

Presently he stirred uneasily; the spirit of unrest, of recklessness was working within him, urged on by liquor. He pushed himself to his feet, and stood, not too steadily, and his eyes seemed to flame as he glared over the crowd. His face seemed to flame, to be kindling from some fire that surged up from depths inside him. His yellow hair, brushed back from his brow, added to the flamelike semblance of him.

He struck the table with his fist and a glass danced over the edge to smash on the floor.

“It’s a hell of a country,” he said, loudly, “and you’re a hell of a lot of men....”

The room fell silent, and every face was turned toward him. He glared into the upturned eyes.

“You’re a lot of crawling, sneaking, penny-chasing rabbits,” he said, distinctly. “Brag and blow—that’s you.... And then somebody kills your wives and babies and you haven’t the guts to kill back again. You’re afraid, the lot of you. You won’t fight. If anybody says war you crawl under the table.... Americans!... I’d rather be an Esquimo.... If anybody slapped your faces you wouldn’t fight.... I’ll show you. I’ll show you what kind of cattle you are.... Now, if there’s a fight in you, come and fight....”

He lunged forward and struck a man, upsetting him against a table. The place was in an uproar. “It’s young Waite—look out. He’s a bad actor.... Call the cops.” Potter swayed forward into the throng at the bar, striking, striking. In a moment he was the center of a maelstrom of shouting, scuffling men—and his laugh rang above their shouts. They struck at him, clutched at him; waiters and bartenders tried to force their way to him. He was pushed back and back, still keeping his feet, still lashing out with his fists, his eyes blazing, his yellow hair rumpled and waving, his reckless laugh dominating the turmoil. His back was against the wall. Before him now was a clear semicircle which none ventured to cross, and he laughed in their faces.

“Fifty to one,” he jeered, “and you’re afraid.”

A couple of policemen shouldered their way through, recognized Potter, and stopped. “Cut it out now, Waite,” said one of them. “Cut it out and come on.”

Potter’s answer was to step forward and strike the officer with all his strength. The other officer did not parley. His night stick was out. He raised it, brought it down on Potter’s yellow hair, and the whole room heard the thud of it.... Potter stood erect the fraction of a second, then the stiffness went out of his body and he sank to the floor a shapeless heap....

The morning papers printed Potter’s picture and news stories of this his most reckless escapade. They also printed moral editorials which, with singular unanimity, pointed out facts concerning young men with too much money, no regard for their citizenship, and mentioned disgracing an honorable name.

CHAPTER III

When the heir to a hundred millions of dollars is arrested in this country for any act less than murder, he does not expect to sleep in a cell. The police do not expect him to sleep in a cell, and the public would be astonished—and a little vexed—if he were compelled to do so. They would be vexed because in the event of his detention, they would be deprived of the pleasure of railing against our institutions and of saying to their neighbors in the street-car that, “a man with enough money can get away with anything.”

“Couldn’t you bring in a kid without usin’ the wood?” the lieutenant at the desk said to the officer who had floored Potter. It did not seem fitting to that lieutenant that a hundred millions of dollars should have its scalp abraided by a night stick.

“Kid, hell!” said the officer. “If you’d ’a’ seen the wallop he handed Tom!”

Potter clung to the edge of the desk, dizzy, swaying, his head not clear between blow and drink.

“Here,” said the lieutenant, “come in here and lay down. Want I should telephone anybody—or git a doctor?”

“No,” said Potter, sinking on the lounge and closing his eyes.

The lieutenant went out and called the superintendent on the telephone. “Got young Waite here,” he said. “He tried to tear the Pontchartrain up by the roots and Kerr had to drop the locust on him a bit. What’ll I do wit’ the kid?”

“Hurt?”

“Didn’t improve him none.”

“Drunk?”

“So-so.”

“Send somebody over to the Tuller with him and have him put to bed.”

It was not for the public to know that the superintendent had two sons who were employed in the Waite Motor Car Company’s plant—for whom he desired fair prospects and promotion.

So Potter slept in an excellent hotel bedroom instead of a cell. He awakened in the morning with a head that was very sore; dressed and went down to the office.

“Your car is out front,” said the clerk. Even that detail had been attended to by a solicitous police force.

At breakfast he read a paper on whose first page he divided honors with the Lusitania. He was not interested in what was said about himself; at first he was not especially interested in what was said about the Lusitania, but as he read his interest grew, changing to hot anger as he read the still incomplete list of the dead. More than one individual was there named with whom Potter had broken bread.

Even in the editorial there was no demand for war; there was astonishment, there was wrath, but it seemed to Potter there was some effort to find an excuse for Germany’s act.... Passengers warned.... Munitions.... Possibility of internal explosion.... Wait for particulars. The attitude of the paper was not quite his father’s attitude, not so frank, but he was able to see it was his father’s attitude disguised for popular consumption. And he was intelligent enough to realize that the finger of that paper was on the public pulse; that, without doubt, the paper was dealing with the situation as the public wanted it dealt with—a public not willing to resent blow with blow.

At the next table a man was saying, “Just because they’ve killed a thousand or so is no reason for us to get into it. War would mean killing another hundred thousand or maybe half a million. Because they’ve killed a thousand, should we let them kill a hundred times as many more? That’s sense.... Make ’em pay for it....”

“What could we do, anyhow?” asked the other. “Might get in with our navy, but there isn’t anything for a navy to do. Couldn’t send an army across three thousand miles of ocean.”

“Right. I’m for the Allies, but my idea is we can help a lot more by staying neutral and sending ’em all the munitions they want.”

“My idea exactly,” agreed the other.

That was it. What could we do? We had no army. Potter had been told that Uruguay had more artillery than the United States. There was no ammunition!... The United States was ready for peace, and the old absurdity about a million squirrel-shooters was gospel in the minds of a hundred millions of people. A million squirrel-shooters armed with what?

Potter got up from the table and went out to his car. He wanted to be alone; he wanted fresh air; he wanted to work off the various uncomfortable sensations that possessed him. He drove recklessly out Jefferson Avenue to the Country Club. At this hour it was deserted save for servants. It would do him good, he thought, to play around alone, without even a caddy, so he donned flannels and shoes, and carried his caddy bag to the first tee.

Somebody else was teeing off—a girl. Potter did not glance at her, but dropped his bag with a clatter and sat down on the bench to wait till she should get out of his way.

“How do you do?” said the young woman.

Potter stood up automatically. “Good morning, Miss von Essen,” he said, without interest.

She turned her back on the ball she had been about to address and walked toward him, slender, graceful, yellow hair blowing out from beneath a tilted tam-o’-shanter. Her face was thin, not especially pretty at first glance, but arresting. The features were distinct, and the expression, even in repose, was one of eagerness—such an expression as one associated with the possession of wit and daring. The expression was akin to pertness, but was not pertness. One knew she could play golf or tennis. One knew she had been a tomboy. One knew she had temper. Her whole appearance and bearing were a perpetual challenge. “Come on,” it seemed to say. “Whatever it is, if there’s a chance to take, let’s do it.” Potter knew she was a girl about whom there had been shakings of the head, not so much because of what she had done as because of what she might do. Conservative mothers preferred some other friend for their daughters—and you felt immediately that Hildegarde von Essen delighted to tantalize such matrons and to set their tongues clacking.

“You gave away something yesterday that you needed yourself,” she said, with directness.

“No,” said Potter, amused as at a pert child. She was only nineteen. “What was it?”

“Advice. ‘You’ll be breaking into print good one of these days, and there’ll be the devil to pay,’” she quoted. “‘You’ll get yourself talked about if you don’t ease off some,’ says you to me.” The effect of it was of a naughty child thrusting out her tongue. “And you take your sanctimonious air right away to the Pontchartrain and drink too much and get into a dis-grace-ful fight, and get arrested, and break into print good. I s’pose,” she said, thoughtfully, “you were jealous—afraid I might steal some advertising and crowd you out.”

Potter laughed, a good, whole-hearted, boyish laugh. The sort of laugh one likes to hear. “It was funny, wasn’t it?” he said.

“Impertinent, I call it,” she said, sharply.

He laughed again. “If you want advice on any subject, you go to an expert, don’t you? Well, I’m an expert on breaking into print and getting myself talked about. My advice is worth something. I ought to charge for it.... Now there’s a notion. How would it do for me to open an office with a sign on the door, Expert Advice on Wild-oats Farming—Years of Experience?”

“You seem proud of it.”

“No, I’m not exactly proud of it. I’m not like little girls who do things for effect.”

She turned her back and marched to her ball, but before she was ready for the stroke she faced him again. “You’re just a naughty little boy throwing paper wads in school,” she said, sweetly, “and you think you’re a grown man being devilish.”

“Eh?” he said, a bit startled. On the face of it she had merely uttered a saucy, childish gibe, but Potter was struck by it. He tucked it away in his mind for future reference. There were elements of shrewdness, of insight, of truth in it.

“I have a puppy who chewed up my best slippers—because he hadn’t anything else to do,” she said.

“Do your friends, by any chance, hint that your tongue is sharp?” he asked.

She made no reply, but her driver whistled viciously through the air in a practice stroke.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, “just to show you I’m forgiving I’ll let you play around with me.”

She looked at him an instant. “I’ll give you a stroke a hole,” she said.

“Eh?”

“I’ve seen you play,” she said, calmly.

“Drive,” he said, with a chuckle. “I ought to put up a cup, oughtn’t I?”

“Make it a ride in that aeroplane thing of yours,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see how it felt to fly. Not just go up and come down, but a regular fly.”

“Not a chance. Your father would assassinate me.”

“You haven’t much confidence in your game, have you? To beat a girl who gives you a stroke a hole.”

“We’d both break into print. Can’t you see it in type? ‘Hildegarde von Essen explores the firmament with Potter Waite,’ with some account of your career with number of fines for speeding, and references to myself. Not nice.”

“Fiddlesticks! We shouldn’t have to invite any reporters....”

“But they’d hear about it. They always do.”

“A stroke a hole,” she jeered.

“Very well. Give me a beating and I’ll take you flying.” He felt confident enough, for he played a fair game of golf.

His confidence decreased after the first hole was played. He outdrove her and had the distance of her, but her every stroke was down the center of the course; she never overestimated her strength, and avoided trouble. On the green she holed a twelve-foot putt—and the hole was hers.

He settled down to play his best. The thing became not merely a game of golf between a man and a girl. It seemed to him that more was at stake than victory or defeat in a pastime. He became interested, intensely interested. He wanted to win and he played to win.... And he watched the girl. She interested him. She was so utterly natural, so without pose, yet so very different from the ordinary run of girls, particularly nineteen-year-old girls. There was a tang about her. It was as if one were eating bread and all unexpectedly encountered some unidentified, some palate-intriguing spice. That defined her for Potter. If he had been going to describe her he would have said she was highly spiced.

Potter played better than usual, but at the end of the ninth hole he was two down. They had talked little. Now she sat down.

“Tired?” he asked.

“Not the least,” she said, “but I find I play the last nine better if I sit here a few minutes and get the first nine out of my mind.... Had you any friends on the Lusitania?” She asked the question suddenly.

“Yes,” he said.

“If I were a man—”

“If you were a man—?” he repeated after her.

“I’d enlist. I wouldn’t wait for this country to go to war. I’d go across. A good many boys have gone, haven’t they? I’d go across and be an aviator—or anything they’d let me be....”

“For the Allies? I took it for granted you would be on the other side of the fence.”

“Pro-German!” Her eyes flashed. “I leave that for Father and his cronies. I believe they celebrated last night—actually. My mother wasn’t German,” she said. Potter knew Mrs. von Essen had died two years before. “I know Germans,” she said, presently. “I ought to; I’ve lived among them all my life.... Sometimes I think the whole race is a button short.” Potter was to learn that in her vocabulary “a button short” meant not quite complete mentally. “I like some of them, and I’d even trust some of them, but most of them are arrogant beasts.... I’ve read their books,” she said. “Dad has a lot of them. People used to think they were nice, slow, harmless, fat, good-natured. Maybe some of them are. But I believe that’s what the German government wanted the world to think.” These were unusual words to hear falling from a girl’s lips. She had been thinking. Perhaps that had happened in her life which made her think. “Will we declare war?” she asked, in her sudden way.

“Last night I was sure we would. To-day I’m almost as sure we won’t.”

She nodded. “People don’t realize.... But we’ll be in it,” she said. “No matter how much we try to stay out, they’ll force us in. They’ll sink another Lusitania and another and another, until we have to come in. You’ll see.... Partly because they don’t understand—and partly because that’s the kind they are. You know a German never understands anybody but a German. They can’t. Just before Mother died she said to me, ‘Garde’—she always called me Garde—‘don’t marry a German, honey. Nobody but a German woman should marry a German.’ And Mother ought to know, oughtn’t she? I’d rather marry a Chinaman,” she said, suddenly becoming girlish again.

“If we have war, what will all the Germans in this country do?”

“Talk loudly till war is declared. Then shut up and do sneaky things. Nothing in the open.... I think,” she said, slowly, evidently trying to set aside prejudice and cling to fact—“I think most of them will be loyal. In spite of their talk, I don’t believe most of them would care to live in Germany and in German conditions. That’s why. But there’ll be enough.” She got up quickly and teed her ball. “Let’s go on,” she said.

Hildegarde played the same steady game as before; Potter’s mind was on other things. Somehow he believed this girl was right; that she read the future truly. The sinking of the Lusitania meant war—sooner or later it meant war.... And the country was unready for war. It did not want to get ready for war.... She had spoken about going across to fight with the Allies. He considered that. It was a thing he was to consider for days and weeks to come. But that was a makeshift. He realized it was a makeshift. There must be something better, something more logical than that.

He won a hole and halved a hole in the last nine.

“When do we fly?” she asked, eagerly.

“I shouldn’t have promised.”

“But you did.”

He nodded. “Whenever you wish.”

“Let’s see. Suppose we say next Tuesday.”

“My car is here. Can I drive you home?” he said.

“I was to telephone for my car. Yes, you may.”

A limousine was just entering the grounds of the von Essen place in Grossepoint when Potter and Hildegarde reached the drive.

“There’s Father,” she said, and her lips compressed a trifle.

A big man who looked not unlike Bismarck, and who endeavored to heighten the likeness, alighted and stood beside the car, looking toward them. It was obvious he was waiting for them. Potter stopped his car and lifted his cap. Herman von Essen scowled.

“Since when are you friends with this young man?” he demanded. “Out of that car and into the house. Have you no sense—to be seen in public with this man whose picture is in the papers? For a girl to be with him is to lose her reputation.... And you”—he turned on Potter furiously—“take your car out of my grounds. Never speak with my daughter again. Do you hear? You are a drunken young ruffian.” He launched himself into a tirade of great circumstantiality.

Potter’s eyes were dark with the brooding expression which his friends counted a signal of danger, but he remained motionless, save to turn toward Hildegarde.

“I am sorry, Miss von Essen,” he said. “I shouldn’t have brought you. I might have foreseen—”

She smiled. It was not a bright smile, but a reckless smile, as reckless as one of Potter’s own might be.

“Thank you for coming.... I hope we shall be friends.” She did not glance at her father, but walked erectly up the steps and disappeared in the house. Von Essen continued verbally to chastise Potter, who did not look at him. Perhaps he did not dare, fearing the weakness of his self-restraint. The young man threw his car into gear and moved away, leaving von Essen gesticulating behind him.

He drove to his own house, a mile beyond. Before he reached there the brooding darkness was gone from his eyes; they twinkled. He was thinking of Hildegarde.

CHAPTER IV

Detroit was flying high; it was spending as few cities have ever spent. Wealth poured in upon her, and men who, ten years before, had worried when they heard their landlady’s step on the stairs were building palaces in the midst of grounds for which they paid fabulous sums for each foot of frontage. No clerk or school-teacher was too poor to own a lot in a subdivision, laid out with sidewalks and shade trees, miles beyond the city’s limits. Overnight land increased in value, so that fortunate ones who paid ten dollars down on a lot sold their equities within the month at profits of hundreds of dollars. Men bought distant pasture-land for a song and sold it for an opera. The streets were full of tales of this man who had made a hundred thousand dollars, of that man who had cleared sixty thousand, of men by the dozens whose bank-accounts had increased more modestly, but still by thousands. Land that had gone begging at ten dollars a foot was eagerly sought at a hundred dollars.... This was a by-product of that great manufactory of wealth, the automobile.

As for it, and its growing sister, munitions, one believed whatever was told, and the tale fell short of the truth. One manufacturer filled the banks with his deposits, and, when they refused to accept more, was obliged to build his own bank.

When money flows in torrentially it washes away walls of economy. Detroit spent as it earned—lavishly. It was just completing what is perhaps the most magnificent clubhouse in the United States—a million-dollar plaything, the money for which had been raised almost in an hour. It was the new Detroit Athletic Club, outgrowth of that historic and honorable old athletic club which had so long been a landmark on Woodward Avenue when land was cheap and a quarter-mile cinder track and football-field might be maintained in the heart of the city. Five thousand men were found instantly who could afford this luxury.

Magnificent new hotels sprang up miraculously; department stores, surprised in their inadequacy by the multiplication of population, were adding annexes treble the size of the original stores. Everybody owned a motor-car.... The cabaret moved westward and found a welcome in a town once famous for its staidness. The handling of motor traffic became a greater problem for the police than the protection of the city from crime. And yet people scarcely realized what was happening. They took it as a matter of course—and flew high with the city.

Across the ocean another type of highflyer was coming into prominence. One might say the war had passed through its second phase. The first phase was the phase of fighting-men, of armies, of obtaining soldiers with rifles. The second phase was the artillery phase, the high-explosive phase. Each for its months filled the papers and demanded the interest of the world.... Now was approaching the third, the aeroplane phase. It was beginning to overshadow the other two in public estimation. Aeroplanes were no longer contraptions which one went to the country fair to watch performing tricks. They had come into their own. They ranked as a necessity. They had emerged from the cloud of obscurity which hung low over the battle-fields, and men were made to realize that victory in the air meant victory in the fields below....

Potter Waite had thought much of this, had hoped for it, had even ventured to prophesy it. One might say he was deeply interested in highflying of both sorts.

A certain fascination which mechanics held for him since childhood had enabled Potter to finish a turbulent college career with a mechanical-engineering degree. This, or what it represented, he had never put to use except in the way of a pastime. But aeronautics interested him. He was so fortunate as to be rich enough to play with aeroplanes, to fly aeroplanes, to own and experiment with aeroplanes, and there was something about the risk of it, the romance of it, the thrill of it, the novelty and the miracle of it, that fitted well into the recklessness of his unsatisfied nature. So he had been one of the country’s earliest amateur aviators. The part taken by the aeroplane in the Great War had quickened that interest, solidified it. It had become something more than the fad of a rich young man to him.

It was during the week that followed the sinking of the Lusitania that Potter was introduced to a Major Craig, of that then comparatively unknown branch of the United States military machinery known as the Signal Corps. It was at the Country Club, and Potter, who was seldom drawn to an individual, felt something much akin to boyish admiration for the slender, trim, uniformed figure of the young major. Craig was young for a major. He might have been forty, but a well-spent man’s life made him appear younger. He had not the face we have taken as typical of our soldier, but rather the softer, gentler features of the enthusiast—not the sharp, hungry look of the fanatic. He was a man with one compelling interest in life, a man bound to his profession, not by duty, but by love. Something of this was apparent at a glance. It became plain upon acquaintance. There was something about him—not the uniform he wore—but a subtle characteristic which set him apart from the run of men. He was distinct. After half an hour’s chat with him Potter perceived that the major was something wholly outside his experience, and he was interested. He was interested in the major’s conversation, in his appearance, but chiefly in that peculiar something which made Craig different from La Mothe or Kraemer or O’Mera. The others who had gathered about the table wandered off upon the links and left Potter and the major alone.

“You are the Potter Waite who has done something in the flying way, are you not?” asked the major.

“A little.”

“I wish,” said the major, enthusiasm fighting in his eyes, “that there were ten thousand of you.”

“There are people around this town,” Potter said, laughingly, “who wish there were one less.”

The major did not join in Potter’s laugh, but regarded the young man shrewdly, appraisingly—with something of sympathy and understanding in his eyes. He got to his feet abruptly. “I should be obliged, Mr. Waite,” he said, “if you would play around with me.”

Presently they were equipped and walking toward the first tee.

“Mr. Waite,” said the major, “have you ever considered the possibility that this country might be compelled to enter the war?”

“Yes,” said Potter, and the major saw that darkening of his eyes, that sullen, restless, forbidding expression which came at times over the boy’s face.

The major laid his hand on Potter’s arm. “You have been disappointed in us, is that it? You thought the country would flare into righteous rage over the Lusitania and go knight-erranting? Is that it?”

“Didn’t you?” Potter countered, a bit sharply.

“I am not permitted to express opinions,” said the major, simply. “You wanted immediate war because you are young and easily moved. Perhaps because you have not thought deeply what war means. I take it you are impulsive.... Have you asked yourself why you want war? Was it mere resentment? That isn’t an excuse for war. Was it the adventure of it? Or was it possibly something bigger and deeper? What do you think of the United States, anyhow?”

Potter did not reply immediately. What did he think about the United States? He did not know. As a matter of fact, he had done very little thinking about the United States; had rather taken the United States for granted. Somehow he felt embarrassed by the question.

“Do you perhaps love your country?” asked the major.

From another man Potter might have regarded this question as a symptom of mawkish sentimentality. From the major it seemed natural, unaffected, as if the major had the right to ask such a question and have a plain answer. Craig waited for Potter to answer, his face grave, gentle; his bearing sympathetic. Potter felt the sympathy, felt that he and this officer could grow to be friends.

“Why,” said Potter, presently, “I don’t know.”

The major nodded his head. “I’m afraid that’s the way with most of us—we don’t know. We’re thinking about ourselves and our businesses and about making money and passing the time. We have grown unconscious of the country just as we are unconscious of the air we breathe. That’s hardly a state of mind to carry us into war, is it?”

“No,” said Potter.

“Because war requires love of country,” said the major. “Not the love of country that orators talk about on July Fourth, but the kind of love that is willing to prove itself. War, Mr. Waite, means sacrifices such as we do not even dream of. It means that love of country must take place over everything else. Not a stingy loyalty, but a real love—the sort that gives life and everything one possesses to the country. Mr. Waite, if we should go to war to-morrow and your country should come to you and say, ‘I want your life. I want everything you possess in the world—wealth, comfort, place. I need everything to win this war,’ what would you say? Would you give willingly and gladly? I mean what I say literally.”

Potter stopped and faced his companion a moment in silence. “Could you?” he asked.

“I think I could,” said Craig. “I think my country means all that to me.”

“Why?”

“That you will have to find out for yourself. I can’t teach you patriotism, love of country, in half an hour, nor in a course of twenty lessons. I couldn’t teach you to love a woman. Each man must find those things for himself.”

“I suppose so,” said Potter, uneasily, and they walked along together in silence.

“We’ve heard a great deal about military preparedness lately,” said the major, presently. “It’s in my mind that we need another sort of preparedness even more. There is such an emotion as patriotism, Mr. Waite, but it seems to be dormant in this people. A couple of generations of ease and prosperity and peace have lulled it to sleep. We have grown careless of our country, as we sometimes grow careless of our parents. But I believe patriotism is here—more than we need universal military training, more than we need artillery and ammunition and war-ships, we need its awakening. We can never have one sort of preparedness without the other.”

“I had never thought about it,” said Potter.

“Will you think about it, Mr. Waite? And when you have thought about it, see if you don’t find it demanding something of you.... Do you know that an army without aeroplanes is like a blind man in a duel with a man who sees? Think about that. I sha’n’t tell you how many ’planes we have, nor how many trained aviators. It would shock you.”

“I know something about that.”

“But have you realized that if events force us into this war we shall need, not hundreds of ’planes, but thousands—possibly twenty-five thousand?”

Potter was astonished at the number. “Really?” he asked.

“That many will be absolutely necessary, and the best and fastest ’planes that can be had. Where will we get twenty-five thousand of them?”

“God knows,” said Potter.

“Mr. Waite, the War Department is not sleeping. Will it surprise you to know that I came to Detroit solely to have this talk with you?”

“With me?”

“We know all about you, and about every other amateur aviator in the country. All about you,” the major repeated.

“I’m surprised you found it worth your while to come, then,” Potter said, with, a trace of bitterness.

“For instance,” said the major, “we know what happened in your Pontchartrain Hotel the night the Lusitania was sunk.”

Potter flushed angrily, but made no reply.

“The manner of it,” said the major, quietly, “was regrettable. The impulse behind it—and we looked for that impulse—was hoped to be something not regrettable. I came to find out that and other things. I have not come to offer advice, Mr. Waite, merely to get information valuable to our country.... Had you thought you might be valuable?”

“General opinion seems to hold the opposite view.”

It was the major’s turn to remain silent. He watched Potter’s face keenly.

“What do you want of me?” Potter asked, finally.

“What would you do if war came?” countered the major.

“Enlist, I suppose. As an aviator, if I could. I’ve been thinking of going to France, anyhow.”

“That’s adventure,” said the major. “And as for enlisting, would you be most valuable there or here—helping to produce those twenty-five thousand ’planes? Think that over.”

“Do you believe we shall be in it?” asked Potter.

“I don’t know,” said the major. “But I do know that the man who goes ahead as if he were sure we shall will be doing the thing he should do. You, for instance, might think aeroplanes, plan aeroplanes, dream aeroplanes—fighting-’planes.... Shall we play around now?”

They played around, for the most part in silence, for Potter was following the major’s direction to think. In the locker-room and in the shower-baths they did not allude to the matter of their conversation, and when they came out on the piazza of the club they found themselves in the midst of a party of younger members talking the sort of talk that is generally to be heard on country-club piazzas and drinking as if that were the business of their lives.

“Hey, Potter,” called Jack Eldredge, “come over here and meet a pilgrim and a stranger—also state your preference.”

The major touched Potter’s shoulder. “Think it all over,” he said, and turned away.

Potter walked to Eldredge’s table, and Jack presented him to a young man in his early thirties who stood up and shook Potter’s hand warmly.

“Mr. Cantor, Mr. Waite,” said Jack. “Mr. Cantor came this morning from New York. Friend of the Mallards and the Keenes. Goin’ to be around Detroit quite some time—so I put him up here, of course.”

“Mr. Eldredge was very kind indeed,” said Cantor. “I have hoped to meet you, Mr. Waite. I have letters to you from Mr. Welliver and Mr. Brevoort.”

They sat down and Potter observed the stranger. He was dark, smooth of face save for a carefully shaped, slender mustache. His features were rather thin, but quick with intelligence. There was a hint of military training in his shoulders. It appeared he had recently come from abroad, and soon was talking fluently and entertainingly about his experiences on the fringe of the zone of war. Potter wondered what his nationality might be. At first he fancied the accent was of Cambridge, but there was another hint of accent underlaying the careful enunciation of the Cambridge man. Potter made the guess that Cantor had been born to some tongue other than English, but had, probably, been educated in one of the English universities. This supposition was proved later to be correct.

“I represent an investment syndicate,” said Cantor to Potter, presently. “They have sent me over to study the situation here, particularly the automobile industry. I seem to have come to the place to do that thoroughly,” he added, with an attractive smile.

“Detroit suffers with the automobile-manufacturing habit. There’s no cure,” said Eldredge.

“What a fascinating location your city has, Mr. Waite!” said Cantor. “I call to mind no other great city situated directly upon an international boundary-line. You sit in your offices and look into foreign territory—but I presume you are so accustomed to it that you seldom give it a thought.”

“Somehow,” said Potter, “we don’t think of Canada as foreign.”

“No,” said Cantor, “but I can conceive of circumstances which would compel you to think of it as foreign. I understand your government is irritated by certain British actions with regard to your mails and shipping. Might not something disagreeable grow out of that?”

“It might. These are puzzling days, Mr. Cantor. I confess I am bewildered by them. Impossible events happen with startling ease, and inevitable consequences fail to follow amazingly. Yes, I can imagine trouble coming with Great Britain, but somehow it does seem unlikely as long as Germany lays a murder on every mail-bag England plays. You aren’t especially apt to bother with a man who jostles you in a crowd if there is another man trying to hit you with an ax.”

Cantor half shut his eyes and peered into his glass. Presently he looked up to Potter and nodded. “I get your point of view,” he said. “I wonder how many people share it.”

“I’ve given up guessing what the people think.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me to see your public opinion veering to favor Germany.”

“Some of our public opinion does favor it. Our German-Americans and such like.”

“A good many of them—millions I understand.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps capable of influencing a majority?”

“I don’t know,” said Potter, and nodded his head, not exactly with satisfaction, but as a man does who fancies he has made a point in an argument. “German public opinion here seems to be organized,” said Potter.

“The German government is efficient. If it has felt the need of fostering your favorable opinion, I think we may say it has taken steps to foster it.”

Potter wondered just where Cantor stood in the matter, but the courteous air of the man, his manner of putting a question, were not those of a man holding to one opinion or the other, but of a seeker after information. He asked questions, but answered none, not even by the expression of his face. He had made no direct statement; had shown neither pleasure nor displeasure with what he had heard. Yet Potter judged him to be a man capable of strong opinions and of taking action in support of them. There was nothing neutral about the man. He was positive, but baffling. He was an individual who would play his cards on the merits of his own hand, Potter thought, and would carry his betting just as far as the value of his cards warranted. Until that point arrived he would not lay down his hand. Potter determined to see what a direct question would produce.

“What do you think of the sinking of the Lusitania?” he asked, abruptly.

Cantor regarded him for an instant with the air of a man who wishes to use care to express himself clearly, and then he replied with such a manner of clarity as made Potter chuckle inwardly.

“The sinking of the Lusitania,” he said, with the positiveness of a man stating an incontrovertible fact, “is a matter without precedent. It is my firm opinion that the German Admiralty considered carefully every effect which might derive from it before ordering the act.”

An ironic rejoinder occurred to Potter—a rejoinder which he would have made regardless of courtesy had his unlovable mood been upon him—but he withheld it now, contenting himself with a smile which Cantor read correctly and answered with a twinkle of his clear eyes. Potter knew that Cantor had weighed his intention to draw a positive statement and rather enjoyed the knowledge that Potter understood fully his evasion of it.

The conversation turned to less momentous affairs, but it seemed as if Cantor could not express fully his admiration for Detroit and for its location. He spoke of the Lakes, of the millions of tons of ore and millions of bushels of wheat traveling past Detroit’s door in the holds of mighty vessels; of vessels which carried northward cargoes of coal to a region where coal was a necessity. He referred to the carriage of passengers by water on steamers of a size and luxury which the stranger perceived with amazement on an inland waterway. He had a word to say about the ship-canals at Sault Sainte Marie and the Welland, and of that minor canal at the mouth of the River St. Clair. Eldredge told him something of the new channel constructed in American waters across Lime Kiln Crossing and Bar Point Shoals below the city, and described how engineers had constructed the mightiest coffer dam in the history of engineering; how they had built dikes miles in length to hold out the waters of the river, pumped dry the areas between, and then sawed their channel out of the dry rock. Cantor was fascinated by it all.

“But,” said he, “those are points of danger, are they not? Suppose that war with England should arrive. Would not your Eastern steel-mills, upon which you must depend for the manufacture of ordnance and munitions, be left helpless if one of these gateways from lake to lake should be closed? Imagine the destruction of the locks at the Soo, for instance? Are they well guarded?”

“Probably,” said Potter, “there is an aged constable with a tin star within calling distance.”

“It is a splendid thing for a country to have the feeling of security that yours holds,” said Cantor, with open admiration that Potter felt, but could not identify, to be derisive.

“Why should we guard them?” Eldredge asked. “We aren’t fighting anybody. Besides, an army never could get to them.”

Potter shot a glance at Eldredge which was tipped with contempt, and Cantor intercepted it and smiled at Potter as one man smiles who shares a bit of humor with another. It was as much as to say, “You and I have more common sense than to say that, haven’t we?”

Cantor drew the conversation away from war again. “You play golf here frequently?” he asked Potter.

“As often as I can manage it.”

“I play a duffer’s game myself, but I hope you will take me on some day. They tell me you are above the average. I shall enjoy watching you—and possibly can pick up some pointers. My approach is miserable—miserable.”

“Easiest stroke in the bag,” said Eldredge.

“No doubt, but there is no easiest stroke for me. In my case they are all difficult, with some worse than the rest.”

“Glad to go around with you any time,” said Potter, and Cantor made it apparent that he was really gratified. He had abilities that way, a manner which seemed, without effusiveness, to express admiration; to show that he was most favorably impressed by a companion.

Either the man was naturally affable or he had set himself with purpose to make friends of those in whose company he found himself at that moment, Potter decided. As for Potter, he did not enter into the conversation, but sat back listening and thinking. Without setting himself deliberately to do so, he studied Mr. Cantor, and was compelled to the conclusion that the stranger was an exceptionally brilliant man; not only that, but a man of personality, dominating personality. The others of the party appeared colorless when set against him. Potter wondered if he himself seemed as colorless as they.

Potter was one who liked or disliked swiftly. Usually, on meeting an individual, he determined instantly and almost automatically whether or not he cared to continue the acquaintance and to admit the stranger to fellowship. He found himself unable to make up his mind about Cantor. That gentleman was too complex to make the judgment of him a matter of a word and a glance.

Potter was disturbed and uneasy. The atmosphere of the club piazza irritated him this afternoon. He could not enter into the spirit of the effort to make dragging time pass endurably, which was the profession of most of the men present. Major Craig had surprised him, had increased the restlessness, the dissatisfaction which so frequently possessed him, and he wanted to go away alone to carry out the major’s direction to think. He got up suddenly.

“I’m off,” he said. “Hope I shall see more of you, Mr. Cantor.”

“I should like to call as soon as convenient,” said Cantor, “to present my letters.”

“We don’t go much on letters of introduction out here,” Potter said, smiling. “A letter of introduction never made anybody like a man he didn’t cotton to, nor dislike a man he took a liking to. Call when you like, and don’t bother with the letters.”

Cantor laughed. “Perhaps you’re right. But I’ve always believed that a man coming to a strange place should come well introduced, if he can. People are suspicious of strangers. I have provided myself with letters because it is important to me that there should be no uncertainties about me.”

“Bring them along, then,” said Potter, who was by nature unfitted to understand how anybody could care much what strangers or acquaintances thought of him.

Potter walked to his car, and in a moment was driving toward the street. A runabout which he recognized at once turned into the grounds and a glance showed him Hildegarde von Essen was driving. She saw him at the same instant, and lifted her hand, drawing over to the side of the drive and stopping. He drew up beside her.

“To-morrow’s Tuesday,” she said.

“Now look here, Miss von Essen, your father—”

“My father’s aunt’s rheumatism!” she said. “Father’s in New York, and you promised.”

“I know I promised, but in the circumstances you ought to let me off. He didn’t exactly welcome me with open arms, and the Lord only knows what he’d do if I took you flying.”

“You promised,” she repeated, stubbornly.

“I know,” he said, with the elaborate pretense of patience one shows to a difficult child, “but—”

“And I’m not afraid of father. To-morrow morning? I’ll be ready as early as you like.”

“Nine-thirty, then,” he said, helplessly, “at the hangar.”

She beamed on him. “You’re a duck, Mr. Waite,” she said, “and I’ll not let father hurt you.”

She drove on and left him looking after her. What a flamelike little thing she was, he thought. What he did not think was—how like she was to himself; how her restlessness matched his; how her recklessness and his recklessness were cut off the same piece. And she was charming in an exciting sort of way. “If she ever cuts loose—” he said to himself.

He drove home and went up to his own rooms to sit down with his pipe and figure matters out. Almost word for word he could repeat what the major had said to him, and he looked for answers to the major’s questions. Did he love his country? What would he do if war came? What ought he to do?... The first was hardest to answer. He had not been accustomed to the idea of love of country, but had been contented with the thought that America was a good-enough place and he was generally satisfied with it. He tried picturing to himself the invasion of Michigan by German troops; the re-enacting of the crime of Louvain upon the city of Detroit. His imagination was vivid, active.... As he created the picture he felt emotion welling up within him, a sense of the unbearableness of what he had imagined, the feeling that he could not endure the happening of such a catastrophe. It was not reason, but heart, that told him there was nothing he would not sacrifice, suffer, endure to prevent it—and then he asked himself why.... It seemed, then, that he did love his country. In that event—what?

CHAPTER V

Hildegarde von Essen sprang boyishly out of her roadster at the door to Potter Waite’s hangar. She looked like a glorious, slender boy in the riding-breeches and puttees she had thought appropriate for the adventure—not like an ordinary boy, but rather like some princeling out of a fairy-tale. There was that air about her—the air of a prince who trafficked with fairies and would ride forth to battle with giants and dragons. Her eyes danced with excitement and anticipation; she was charged with eager life until it seemed to radiate from her and to form a tingling aura about her.

Potter appeared in the doorway and stopped abruptly as his eyes found her. It was the sincerest tribute. He felt as if some potent current had darted out from her to touch him with its mysterious force—almost as if it arrested his heart an instant and made it skip a beat.... That was the way she looked; not dazzlingly beautiful; the effect was not that of beauty, but of something more compelling, more thrilling. It was rather as if Youth in person advanced to meet him—throbbing, eager, glowing Youth; neither masculine nor feminine, but the personification of everything young, ardent, breathless, fearless.

“I’m early,” she said, “but I had to come. I hardly slept all night for thinking about it.”

He advanced, finding that he very much wanted to take her hand, and she looked up into his face and laughed impishly, for it was plain reading to her that she had startled this young man and unsettled his equilibrium.

“Come in,” he said, rather stupidly. “We’ve been tinkering, but we’re nearly ready now, I guess.” He knew it was hardly the thing to say to such a magical creature, but it was the best he could do.

She walked to the machine and patted the tip of its wing. “We’re going to be friends, aren’t we?” she said to it, and smiled up at Potter again. “How do I get in? Where do I sit?” Her voice was eager.

It had been in his mind before she came to try to persuade her against the flight; to show her the inadvisability of it, especially in the face of her father’s attitude toward him. He did not make the effort now. It seemed futile, not to be considered, so he helped her to her place silently. “Ready?” he asked one of the men in overalls who were going fussily about the ’plane, touching wires, testing braces.

“Ready, sir.”

Potter looked at Hildegarde. No trace of fear or nervousness was visible, nor was she calm. Her eyes danced with excitement, her face was alight with gay eagerness. “I don’t suppose I could drive it, could I?” she asked.

“Well, hardly,” Potter said.

“I’d love to. I’m sure I could.”

“This is your excursion,” he said, disregarding her manifest desire to become pilot of the craft. “What part of the earth shall we fly over?”

“It’s to be a good, long fly, you know,” she said. “Not just up and down like those twenty-five-dollars-a-ride things we had here last year. I want to go miles and miles.... Let’s go right across the lake to the Flats and then swing around and come home over Mount Clemens. Can we do that?”

“I have made that circle.”

“What do I do?”

“Sit still and hang on. There’s no promenade-deck to this ship—no orchestra and no dancing.”

“Are you a dancing-man?”

“Far from it. The thé dansant is too dangerous for me. I don’t speak the language.”

“I love to dance,” she said. “I don’t know that the language is more difficult than the one you speak while we dance on the floor above. ‘Waiter, another round of cocktails.’”

Potter climbed up and settled himself in his seat. “You’re not going to quarrel because I don’t like dancing?” he asked.

“I’d forgive you ’most anything this morning. Let’s start. I’m crazy to know how it feels.”

The engine started with a tremendous throbbing roar and the hydro-aeroplane was trundled out on its rails and down the incline to the smooth waters of Lake St. Clair. For an interval it scudded along, neither floating nor flying, like a wild duck frightened and beginning its flight; then the water dropped away, and they were mounting, mounting into the clear, cold spring air.

Potter directed their flight out over the lake, presently veering to the northward and heading toward a small black blot resting distantly on the glittering expanse of water. Hildegarde’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes excited, brilliant. She sat drinking in the sensation of flight, and watching with childish joy and wonder as the lake spread its beautiful panorama beneath and on all sides of them. It seemed but a moment before the distant blot became the familiar light-ship, and, looking ahead, she could see dimly the parallel lines which she knew must be the ship-canal which opened a passage for the largest freighter through the bars and shoals into that channel of the delta of the St. Clair River which has for a generation been a marvelous playground for the Lake region, a playground rising on a ribbon of spiling—a sort of hem binding the raveling edge of the great marsh.

Slow as the ’plane was, compared with those miracles of speed with which the chivalry of the air hold their tournaments in the lists of the sky, it seemed to eliminate time and space. Distances which the swiftest vessel passed laboriously in an hour seemed to withdraw themselves as at a magic word of command. Abreast of the light-ship they passed an up-bound freighter. Its deck seemed a mammoth gridiron as Hildegarde looked down upon it—a gridiron whose cross-bars were battened hatches. It was traveling its fifteen miles an hour on its way to Duluth or Superior—but they left it behind. It dropped away from them almost with the swiftness of a falling stone.

They flew low over the piers, and then mounted. Beneath them lay the familiar, rambling structures of the Old Club. They continued to mount, for Potter wanted to spread before her the great reaches of the delta—a world of close-growing wild rice and reeds, a universe of wild birds, myriad tiny islets, with here and there a strip of land high enough above the water to supply a foothold for wind-bent, scraggling trees. Here and there wound a maze of channels, some navigable by small boats, and to the northward another gleaming river, the North Channel, up which the fleets of the Lakes had been compelled to pass before the construction of the ship-canal.

Before them stretched the interminable line of summer cottages and hotels, untenanted now. To the right and left of it were loneliness, desolation—yet a certain arresting beauty. Hildegarde felt a sudden loneliness.

Potter veered to the left over huge Muscamoot Bay, a bay whose waters were hidden by reeds and rice—a hundred square miles of reeds and rice and shallows. One could wade almost the length and breadth of it. Hildegarde picked out a tiny island in the midst of the waste, and the thought came to her that here one could hide in security if all the world joined in the hunt.

She became aware that the motor no longer roared in perfect rhythm. It seemed to pant and labor, to snort in disgust. It was missing, and she saw that Potter was intent upon it. Suddenly silence fell. Hildegarde had not known that silence could be like this. It was as if the end of all sound in the universe had come, as if life had been extinguished, and they two, soaring in the sky, were alone left of all the teeming millions of the earth’s population....

She was not frightened, but looked at Potter’s face for its expression. It was one of irritation, not of alarm.

“We’ll have to ’plane down while I tinker,” he said. “This is a fine day for something to go wrong.”

“It’ll be fun,” she exclaimed. “Imagine being cast away down there—in an aeroplane!”

“It won’t be such a picnic if I can’t get her going again. Hotels and mechanicians and telephone service are moderately scarce below.”

All the while they were sliding down an invisible hill, swiftly, smoothly. A narrow ribbon of open water lay below them, and Hildegarde imagined Potter to be heading for it as a place of landing.

“Why,” she exclaimed, “there’s a house!”

Potter did not turn his head; he was busy now with the ’plane.

“There are a few scattered in the bay—squatters and summer folks. Muskrat trappers and French fishermen.... Mighty lonesome, I’d say.”

A puff of wind caused the ’plane to swerve and rock. Hildegarde saw Potter suddenly in feverish action. They were swerving away from the ribbon of water, which was now close below, veering toward the island upon which she had been astonished to see a house.... The ’plane would not obey. It swept on and down.... Almost in a winking of the eye the solid land was before them ... a tree.... Hildegarde felt a wrench, a shock, heard a crash, and saw the planes at their right side crumple and shatter as they were sheared off in collision with the willow-tree.... The crippled ’plane careened sickeningly—and there was a frightful shock....

Potter, half blind, dizzy, suffering agonies, crept out of the wreckage. One leg dragged helplessly. There was a wrenching pain inside. Dumbly he looked for Hildegarde. She lay at a little distance—without movement. She was stretched at full length, her face pillowed on her arm as if she had lain down on the grass for a nap. Peacefully, gracefully she lay—but very still. Potter dragged himself toward her, reached her. Then he was conscious that a man was running to them, was stooping over them. He looked up into the man’s face. It was very confusing. He seemed to know the man, yet it was impossible the man should be there....

“How do you do, Cantor?” he said. “Did you—bring—your letters?...”

Then his arms failed him and he slumped downward, his face resting on Hildegarde’s knees.

The man Potter had called Cantor turned the young man over gently, wiped the blood from his face with his handkerchief, and grunted. He opened Potter’s clothing and laid an ear to his breast. The heart was beating feebly.... Hasty examination showed him Hildegarde was alive, too.

“Start the boat,” he called over his shoulder. “Be quick about it.” He lifted Hildegarde and carried her past the house to a tiny dock and handed her aboard a narrow, cabined motor-boat. “Two of you get the man,” he said.

“What will we do with them?” a man asked, in German.

“To the hospital in that town—Mount Clemens,” the man in authority replied, in the same language. “They’re badly hurt. I doubt if he lives to get there.”

“So much the better,” growled the man. “Do you go with us?”

“I remain.... You found them on the shore ten miles from here. Don’t be definite. To-night we’ll get the wreck of this machine across and out of the way.”

“What was he doing here, Herr?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.... The chances are he’ll never regain consciousness. If he does he won’t be able to remember anything.... Make haste, for he’s more valuable alive than dead.”

The motor-boat swung into the channel and sped away. Once in open water, it showed an astonishing gift of speed as it made for the mouth of the Clinton River.

Not as they wound their way up the narrow river, not as they touched the wharf, did Potter or Hildegarde betray a sign of returning consciousness. The man in charge leaped ashore. He had chosen his landing with judgment, for the spot was deserted. For ten minutes he disappeared, returning with two men from a near-by office.

“We found them on the shore ten miles up,” said the man who habitually spoke in German, but whose English was acceptable. “They fell with an aeroplane.”

“Who are they?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t know anything.... We found them, that’s all.”

Presently the authorities who had been telephoned for arrived, and Potter and Hildegarde were lifted gently and carried away. In the haste and excitement the men who had brought them to the spot were not questioned, as they might have been in a city more accustomed to the handling of accidents. As the two inert bodies were carried away the motor-boat quietly moved away from the dock and headed down the river. No one thought to hold it. Presently it disappeared....

At the hospital Potter was quickly identified by the contents of his pockets. There was no clue to Hildegarde’s identity. The news of the accident to his son was telephoned to Fabius Waite, and local correspondents of Detroit papers saw that the story went where it should go. In two hours city reporters were on hand, for the thing promised to be that desirable thing known to newspaper men as a “big story.”

The early editions carried brief accounts of the accident to Potter Waite and an unknown young woman.... Identification came later, and in the morning papers the names of Potter Waite and Hildegarde von Essen were coupled in a manner not likely to give satisfaction to the girl’s father.

Reporters set out to find the smashed aeroplane, but their search was futile. It was not found until noon next day, when a farmer on the shores of Baltimore Bay telephoned that it lay against a tree on his farm, near the shore. Reporters viewed it, and from its position were able to describe accurately how the thing had happened. “Must have been pickled again,” was the consensus of their experienced opinion, and they did not hesitate in their accounts to impart this view to their public. Also the morning papers reported that Potter would not live through the day. Hildegarde was still unconscious, but hopes for her recovery were entertained by the surgeons in charge.

Altogether it was looked upon as the inevitable—and fitting—termination of the reckless career of a vicious and depraved youth. It was an affair to be reveled in by the sensational press. They made an orgy of it.

CHAPTER VI

“Any news of Potter Waite to-day?” Tom Watts asked, as he dropped into a chair at the table which was regarded as the property of the crowd in the Pontchartrain bar.

“No change,” La Mothe said. “Still unconscious or something like that.”

“Anybody seen him? Any of the crowd been out to Mount Clemens?” asked Brick O’Mera.

“No good. They wouldn’t let anybody in. They say he just lies with his eyes half open. When you say he’s alive that ends it. It’s a matter of days, they say.”

“Seems like we ought to do something—this crowd he trained with,” said O’Mera.

“We’ll get together and send him some bang-up flowers,” said Randall. “One of those pillow things, or a horseshoe or something. Most likely they’ll want us for pall-bearers.”

“I sent him a box of cigars and a book,” said Kraemer, seriously.

“Which, being unconscious, he’s enjoyed like the devil,” said La Mothe. “There’s the Teutonic mind for you, fellows. Gets an idea and goes ahead with it regardless.... I suppose if Potter had been an Englishman you’d have sent him cigars with dynamite in ’em.” La Mothe took great joy in baiting Kraemer, for whom, nevertheless, he had a very considerable affection.

“You always send cigars and books to a sick man,” Kraemer said.

“And torpedo vessels—even when there are women and babies on ’em. Women and babies ought to keep off vessels, is that your idea?”

“Of course.... Listen here, you fellows.” His voice changed to the voice of one repeating a lesson learned by heart. Even the wording was not his own. “Germany acted within her rights in sinking the Lusitania, because she gave preliminary notice to all the world by establishing a war zone around England. She gave special notice to travelers before the sailing of the Lusitania. England is to blame for what happened because she used American citizens as human shields to guard ammunition supplies on an English auxiliary cruiser.”

“Hear! Hear!” applauded La Mothe. “Doesn’t he recite beautifully! Who taught you the piece, Wilhelm?”

“I hear the von Essen girl is coming out all right,” said Watts.

“Her father said so at the Harmonie last night,” Kraemer told them. “She’ll be out of the hospital in a couple of weeks. Nothing broken, just shock, and a little concussion.... If Potter doesn’t die von Essen will kill him. He talked like a crazy man.”

“Wonder how she got mixed up with Potter?” Watts said. “She’s only a kid, isn’t she?”

“The speediest kid this town’s seen for a while. Regular little devil. Always up to something. They say she had old von Essen fighting for air most of the time.” La Mothe usually could be trusted to supply the spice. “Natural enough she and Potter should fly in a flock. Same kind of birds.”

“The rate Potter was traveling, he was bound to come a cropper some day,” said Randall, virtuously.

They were already speaking of him in the past tense; Potter Waite, in a couple of weeks, had become something that used to exist.

“You could trust him to make it a gilt-edged, sensational cropper when he got to it,” La Mothe rejoined. “He was one good scout.”

“But peculiar. He was all-fired peculiar,” Kraemer said, seriously. “I never quite understood him.”

“Well, the data’s all in, Wilhelm; there’ll never be any more. Study over it a few years and you may begin to get him.”

“You’ve got to hand it to Potter for one thing,” said Watts; “if he made up his mind to do a thing he would pull it off, hell or high water.”

There was a moment’s silence, a moment’s depression, then La Mothe said, “Seen the new girl that’s dancing at the Tuller?”

Interest quickened. One might almost say that the agile, silken-clad legs of the dancer kicked Potter Waite out of the minds of his friends. Why not? They had pronounced his obituary. He had been and was not. Dancers must dance and cocktails must be mixed and the world must wag on as is its custom, though more important personages than a reckless, headstrong, purposeless boy be removed from the scene.

Two weeks and three days passed over Potter’s unconscious head. He did not know that his mother sat by his bedside through long days and slept in an adjoining room through sleepless, woeful nights. He did not know how much of the priceless time of his busy father was spent in that still room. Had he been conscious he might have understood something of his mother’s agony, for, quiet, simple as she was, she had retained her turbulent son’s affection. Perhaps she understood him. Assuredly she had never abandoned hope for him even when his wildest escapade was bruising her heart. But she had not been strong enough, forceful enough, to restrain him, and, realizing her limitation, she had grieved silently.

In his most alert moment Potter could not have read Fabius Waite’s mind. A tidal wave of business success had carried Fabius far away from his son, into a distant country. For a dozen years they had been growing farther and farther apart, each taking the other for granted, looking upon the other as something that was and could not be blinked. Fabius had no time for his son; Potter had no time for his father. They had no point of contact.... It was natural that Potter should now be unable to see into his father’s heart and comprehend the love that had sprung to life again, the dull ache of self-accusation that would not be assuaged. He could not know that Fabius Waite was saying in his secret soul, “This is my son, my only son, and I have sinned against him.”

“Mother,” said Fabius, that afternoon, and his voice was different from the voice with which he usually spoke, “this is my fault.”

She did not seek to comfort him by a denial. “We have both been to blame,” she said, gently.

Fabius was silent a moment; then he said, fiercely, “I’ve been a hell of a father....”

She laid her hand on his knee and he placed his hand over it. Many years had passed since they had sat with hand touching hand.... The nurse sat looking from the window, her back to the bed. Suddenly a voice, yet not a voice so much as the ghost of a voice, spoke from the pillow. It was not a babble, not a mutter. It was a whisper directed by a mind. “Hello—folks!” it said.

Father and mother were on their feet, bending over the bed. Their son had spoken; his eyes looked up at them, dim, but intelligently; their son whom famous surgeons had told them would never regain consciousness!

“He knows us! He knows us!” his mother whispered.

“Sure,” Potter said. “What ...”

Then he was gone again into that murky region which was not life and which was not death.

“Nurse!” said Fabius Waite, tensely, “he spoke. He recognized us.... What—what does that mean?”

The nurse knew no more than they. It might be a promise held out to them; it might have been his farewell to the world. She could not tell.

“He knew us,” Fabius said to himself again and again. “He knew us.”

So the boy who could not live lived on. Intervals of consciousness came again and again, and lasted longer and longer. The physicians, who would not admit of hopes at first, were compelled—against their wills, it seemed—to give Potter a reluctant chance of recovery.... Another ten days saw him fully conscious—not safe yet, but with chances of safety multiplied. Though doubts existed in the medical mind, none were permitted to exist in the minds of Fabius Waite and his wife. Their son was to be given back to them; they knew it.

Despite fractured bones, despite invisible but awful injuries, Potter not only clung to the life that was in him, but reached out and strengthened his grasp upon it, until even the medical mind was convinced and, with due eye to its reputation, gave to the parents the assurance, “We’ve saved him,” and then expatiated on the miracle wrought by its skill. Two months after the catastrophe Potter Waite was on his snail-like way to recovery.

At first Potter seemed to have little curiosity regarding his accident. He appeared not to remember it or to have any idea why he was in his bed in a hospital. Later he asked questions.

“Somebody was with me,” he said one day. “When we fell ...”

“Hildegarde von Essen,” his mother said.

“Was she—”

“As well as ever,” his mother said, a bit resentfully. “She has been out of the hospital for weeks.”

“That’s ... good,” said Potter.

A day or two later he asked about his ’plane. “What’s become of it?” he wanted to know.

“It’s up on the shore where you—fell,” his mother said.

“The shore?” he repeated. “The shore?... What shore?”

“About ten miles up on Baltimore Bay,” she said.

He thought about that for minutes, and it was apparent he was not satisfied. “It was on an island,” he said. “A little island ... not on Baltimore Bay.... Just back of the Flats.”

“No, son, it was on the mainland. You—you don’t remember.”

He shook his head uneasily, and his eyes were puzzled. “There was an island,” he said, and then let the subject drop as if he were too weary to go on with it.

“Is the war still going on?” he asked, one day.

“Yes.”

“Are we in it?” he asked, after a pause.

“No.”

“We should—be,” he said. “There’s some reason why we should, but I seem to—have forgotten it.”

Day by day he grew stronger; day by day his memory returned to him, and he brooded over his recollections. For hours he would lie with closed eyes—thinking. It was the first quiet he had ever known; the first opportunity ever forced upon him to think. He remembered Major Craig.

“Would you like to read to me?” he asked, one day.

“I’d love to, son. What shall I read?”

“I wish you’d get a history of the United States—the best one there is. I’d like you to read that.”

So his mother sat by his bedside and read to him the history of his country, and when she laid down the book he considered what she had read, and pondered over the significance of it. He had been vaguely familiar with the history of the nation, but only vaguely. Now he was meeting his country for the first time, and groping for an understanding of it. Major Craig had asked him if he loved his country.... He fancied he had answered that question when he imagined it invaded as Belgium had been invaded. Now, day by day, he was learning why he should love his country; what his country meant, why it existed, why it had prospered, what his country was giving to him as one of its citizens. The United States was emerging from chaos in his mind, assuming a distinct entity, a character.... It was a lovable character. As he lay there, listening to the story of its life, Potter Waite was falling in love—he was falling in love with his country and his country’s flag.

His mother understood something of what was passing in his mind. It made her glad, for there was promise in it.... One day, following the completion of the history, she brought a thin little book.

“I’d like to read this to you, son,” she said, and he, not even asking for its name, because he thought to please her, nodded assent. It was a story with a peculiar title. “The Man Without a Country,” his mother said.

She commenced to read, and he lay with eyes closed, his attention not fixed. Presently he opened his eyes, and before half a dozen pages were read he was giving to the reading such attention as he had never given to any narrative before. His eyes did not leave his mother’s face, and there came into them a hungry, troubled look.... His mother’s face became dim, and he realized that he was seeing through a mist. Every word of that wonderful lesson, that text-book of patriotism, was reaching his mind as with rays of white light. At last she finished and looked down at him, and his cheeks were wet. She did not speak. It was he who spoke after a long silence.

“That’s the answer,” he said, and his mother, possessing that marvelous quality, intuition, went quietly out of the room.

It was not long before he was able to sit up. Two weeks past the second month of his confinement, he was well enough to be taken to his home, and there, in his own rooms, he demanded books. Not the books one might suppose, not books to pass the long hours of convalescence lightly, but treatises on the gas-engine, on carburetion, on ignition; highly specialized books on the aeroplane.

“I should think you’d had aeroplane enough,” his father said—a father who was now nearer to him by much than he had been before. “You’re not going to meddle with those things again, I hope.”

“Dad,” said Potter, slowly, “they’re the only thing I’m going to meddle with. They’re my business, and I haven’t any other business.... I’m going to be the man in the United States who knows more about aeroplanes and how to build them than anybody else.... And some day I’m going to build them.”

“Can’t make it a commercial success, son. Nothing in it. If you want to get into business seriously, why, when you’re strong enough, just drop around at the plant. I’ll give you all the business you want.”

“I’m not thinking about commercial success,” said Potter.

“What’s the big idea, then?” his father asked, jocularly.

“Do you believe we can keep out of this war?” Potter countered.

“Certainly. Why not? All we’ve got to do is keep our heads level and mind our own business. Nobody can get to us, and we couldn’t get to anybody. You can’t go to war in this country unless the people want war—and you never saw a people who want war less.”

“They’re educated not to want war,” Potter said, with an access of shrewdness. “Business is educating them, and I shouldn’t be surprised if Germany was helping the education along. The Germans seem to be pretty well organized in a publicity way over here.”

“Well, don’t let the possibility of war bother you. It won’t come.”

“I’m afraid, Dad,” Potter said, “that it will come. If it comes, what shape are we in to fight? Do you realize that we would have to have twenty thousand aeroplanes? That’s one item, but one of the most important. Twenty thousand! An army of millions—and the aeroplane is as vital to the army as the commissariat. That’s fact. You can’t dodge it. And we’ve got to get ready. Not to build an army of men alone. That is simple compared to the other things.... Where would we get twenty thousand aeroplanes if they were necessary suddenly?”

“We wouldn’t,” said Fabius, and he laughed indulgently. “When you’re well, you’ll get these notions out of your head. It’s just your condition, son. It’ll work off.”

“No, Dad. It’s here to stay.... We’ve got about fifty ’planes to-day. Bulgaria’s got more.... Do you care much if this country keeps on?”

“Why, sure! I’m an American. It’s my country, but I guess nobody’s going to monkey with us.” It was the old, absurd notion of military invincibility.

“We’re going to get a mighty unpleasant waking up.... We’ve got to get ready. If we’re ready there’s less likelihood of trouble than if we aren’t. Burglars don’t break into a house when a policeman is standing in front and a bulldog is barking inside.... It’s insurance. But we won’t get ready. Not all of us.” He paused, and something in the level determination that shone from Potter’s eyes impressed his father.

“But one of us will be ready,” Potter said, “and that’s me. I’m going to be ready for the day when the country needs that twenty thousand ’planes. I’m going to know how to build them, and I’m going to know where and how they can be built. Dad, the day’s coming when the main business of the Waite Motor Car Company will be the building of aeroplane engines.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Fabius Waite, and there could be no doubt of his sincerity. Fabius Waite considered himself a good American. He was a good American, but, like millions of other able, sincere, honest, country-loving men in those summer days of the year 1915; those days which were seeing Italy’s entrance to the war, which were witnessing Mackensen’s war-machine crushing the Russians out of Galicia, capturing Przemysl and then Lemberg; wondering if Calais and the Channel ports could be held;—like those other millions Fabius Waite was asleep. Potter’s voice was of one crying in the wilderness. All ears were shut against him.

CHAPTER VII

If every young man could be put in a position where he could do nothing but think for a matter of a couple of months just at that time when he is ready to take up the major business of his life, one may well believe the history of the world would be other and better than it is. Potter Waite was injured early in May. Three months passed before he was able to take the air even in a slowly driven, pillowed limousine. If ever a chance were given a human being to check up on his accounts, take a trial balance, and arrive at definite conclusions with respect to himself, Potter had that chance. Not only had he the opportunity, but a vital consideration had intervened, urging him to wider, deeper, bolder considerations. He thought much about Potter Waite, but the time in which he lived, the world turmoil which surrounded him, the pressure of great events on his own life, compelled him to think about himself with respect to grave, impending affairs and to the requirements of his country, which he had come, in some measure, to know.

This state of affairs developed in him a rare singleness of purpose. From the beginning of time men with rare singleness of purpose have been regarded as monomaniacs, cranks. They have been derided. The world has whispered about them behind its hands and snickered. This was an attitude which Potter was to encounter, first from his father, later from those who had formerly been his cronies.

Fabius Waite became more and more irritated by his son’s absorption in aeronautics, for he was a practical business man, and when he could not see how a profit could be entered in the ledger from a given transaction, he deleted the transaction.

“I’m glad, of course,” he said to Potter, “to see you taking an interest in something—outside the Pontchartrain bar and the chorus of a comic opera—but you’re going over the line with this thing. You’re getting as bad as Old Man Jeffords. I sit in directors’ meeting at the bank with him once a week, and he’ll butt into any sort of a discussion with idiocy about some new postage stamp he’s found in somebody’s attic. I suppose people must have fads and amusements.” He said it as if he did not in the least see why they should have such absurd things. “But they can be carried too far. You’re riding this hobby day and night. Aeroplanes! There’s no money in aeroplanes.”

“I’m not thinking of making money out of them,” said Potter.

“Then why are you monkeying with them? Too much aeroplane, or too much golf, or too much bridge, or too much anything that interferes with a man’s business, is about as bad as too much whisky.”

“But aeroplanes are my business.”

“Fiddlesticks, son! You’ve been sick a long time, and you’ve gotten this notion. Automobiles is your business.”

“I guess we don’t get the same point of view, Dad. You’re interested in one thing and I’m interested in another. Somehow they don’t match up.”

“I should say they didn’t.... I think you and I are better friends than we used to be, son.”

“Yes,” said Potter.

“On the whole, your accident was a good thing for both of us.... I’ve gotten acquainted with you, son, and it’s done me good. You had me going for a while. I thought you were a worthless young cub who would never do anything but squander what I made—and, by Jove! I was going to fix things so you couldn’t! But you’re not. You’ve got the stuff in you to take my place and carry on the business. A few years’ training and you’ll be up to the job. Don’t let any foolishness like this aeronautic stuff side-track you. Why, you’ve got to be a regular darn fanatic about it!”

“I suppose I have, Dad. I guess it needs a fanatic.”

Fabius shook his head with disgust. “I don’t want folks saying my son’s a crank,” he said. “I suppose boys at your age are bound to have enthusiasms, but there’s just one kind of enthusiasm that’s worth a tinker’s dam, and that’s enthusiasm about your business.”

“I’m sorry, Dad, if I disappoint you so much. I expect to come into the business after a while—when the world quiets down. I’ll work there as hard as you want me to, but first I’ve got to do this thing. It’s got to be done. Nobody knows what will happen. You believe in fire insurance, don’t you?”

“Naturally.”

“But you go ahead planning as if there wouldn’t be a fire. You don’t expect a fire.... But you admit the possibility of it?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, try to look at this thing in that way. We don’t know what a year or two years may bring. Germany may be licked or the Allies may be licked, ... or we may be dragged into it. That’s a fire we’ve got to insure against. And I’m going into one line of the insurance business—the aeroplane line. If the fire comes we’ve got to have aeroplanes to put it out. If it doesn’t come, no harm will be done by insuring.... The difference is that I believe it’s coming—and we won’t be ready.”

“All balderdash.”

Potter got up and walked slowly across the room. It was not easy, and his father was making it harder than it ought to be. He thought he understood his position and his reason for assuming it so clearly—that they were so clear no one could fail to agree with him, yet his father utterly failed to comprehend. Potter despaired of making him understand.

“Dad,” he said, “let’s make a bargain. Give me two years. Call it a vacation or call it a course in mechanics or call it whatever you want to. We ought to know where we’re at by that time. At the end of two years I’ll come into the business and do whatever you want me to—but for two years let me go ahead with this thing and don’t interfere with me.... I’ll need some money, too. I’ve got to experiment. The experimenting won’t do any harm. It’ll be with gas-engines. Maybe I’ll turn out something that will be worth money in our business.... just two years—and I’m pretty average young yet.”

His father shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll go you,” he said, with the air of a man compelled against his will. “Two years it is, and then you quit this foolishness and come down to earth.... But it’s dog-gone nonsense.”

One man did not share this common opinion. He was the bearded, ponderous, blinking man of monstrous girth who had brought Potter into the world and fed him pills and potions for his juvenile ailments—Old Doctor Ormond.

“Potter,” said the old gentleman, “you’ve been down for three months. You’ve taken into your system only the things you should have taken into it. You have eaten as God and your stomach intended a man should eat, and drunk as they intended you should drink. You’re going to be well—as well as ever. There won’t be a limp, probably. I can guarantee that there isn’t a drop of alcohol about you. You’re going to start clean. If you’ll take my advice, which probably you won’t, you’ll keep that way. Presbyterians used to say hell was paved with unbaptized infants. I say it’s paved with cocktail-shakers....”

Potter chuckled. “I’ve been thinking about the cocktails,” he said. “I’m afraid I sha’n’t have time for them. And I used to know bartenders by their first names.”

“Do you ever feel a hankering?”

Potter shook his head. “I never did when I had anything else to do.”

“Um!... Have you anything else to do now?”

Potter held up the book on his lap. It was a treatise on carburetion. “Aeroplanes,” he said, shortly.

“Your father said something about that,” said the doctor. “What’s it all about?”

“While I’ve been down and out,” Potter said, slowly, “I’ve discovered that I’ve been a man without a country. I’ve found my country. I’ve thought hard and I believe my country is going to need me.... It can have me. If we get into this war, Doctor, we’re going to need twenty thousand aeroplanes—quick. I’ve a knack that way. By the time this country needs the ’planes I’m going to know more about building them than anybody else this side the water—I’m going to be on the spot—ready.... That’s all there is to it. Dad thinks it’s a fad like stamp-collecting, and that I’m a crank.”

“If it is,” said the fat old practitioner, blinking his eyes, “I wish a hundred millions of us could get bumped on the head and have a similar fad jarred into us. You go to it, son. Stay by it. Don’t let them whisper and ridicule you out of it. Do you know that the greatest automobile manufacturer in the world was once called Crazy Henry by his friends? You don’t hear anybody calling him Crazy Henry now, do you?... And remember this: There’ll always be some to believe in you, and their belief will be worth more to you than the ridicule of all the rest. There’ll be a girl.... And there’ll be a fat old man. Shake, son.” They shook hands gravely. “Now get well—and show ’em.”

The last thought the doctor left with Potter remained. “There’ll always be some to believe in you.... There’ll be a girl.” He wondered if there would be a girl, and if she would believe in him. Naturally there would be a girl sometime; there never had been girls who ranked higher than episodes. He had never seen a girl he wanted as a man should want the girl who is to be his wife. Marriage had been a dim event in the distant future. It was so now. But, he thought, to have such a girl, to give her such a love as he could imagine—and to have her believe in him! That would be something. He pondered it.

Somehow he found himself thinking about Hildegarde von Essen. It was a pleasant exercise. He recalled her as he had seen her that morning when she alighted from her machine at the door of his hangar, radiant, vibrant, boyish—a flame of a girl. That picture had persisted.

They had visited the borderland of death together. That event connected them, would always connect them, by an invisible thread. He would not think of her as he thought of other women, nor she of him. Always the one would be to the other something peculiarly distinct. There was an overpowering intimacy about knocking hand in hand at the door of death.

He wondered how she was, wished he might see her. He had not seen her since that moment when he had crawled to her as she lay so still and graceful, like a lovely boy asleep. That wakened other puzzling memories. The scene was so distinct—the little island, the reaches of the great marsh.... And yet the island and marsh had not existed. They had fallen on the mainland miles from any such island! The ’plane had been found against a tree miles away from it. There had been a man.... Potter was certain he remembered a man, and that the man’s face had been familiar to him, but he could not recall the man’s identity. The whole thing gave him a queer, gasping sensation. It was like thinking on eternity or on limitless space—something inconceivable. He compelled himself to take his mind away from it.

Hildegarde von Essen was away, had been sent away by her enraged father as soon as she was able to travel. First she had gone to an aunt in the Adirondacks, was now with friends on the Maine coast. Potter’s mother had told him this and had told him, too, of the raging call Herman von Essen had made on Fabius Waite, of the arrogant, brutal manner of the man toward the father of a boy whose death was declared inevitable. Fabius Waite had shown von Essen the door almost with violence.

Yes, Potter wanted to see her....

That afternoon a servant brought him a letter. It was from her, the first of her handwriting he had ever seen.

“Dear Potter,” she began, addressing him by his given name, and he did not regard it as forward or provocative. It was merely due to the intimacy of their adventure with death, and natural to him. “I just found out you were able to read letters,” she went on. “You can’t imagine the pains people are at to keep news of you from me. It’s as if I’d tried to elope with you and been caught. You knew father shipped me away. You don’t know how glad I was to know that you are going to be all right again. Somehow I felt to blame.” How abruptly, jerkily she wrote, changing from one subject to another without warning. It was like her, he thought. “I don’t know when I shall be home, but I’m making myself as disagreeable as possible. I don’t think they’ll be able to stand me much longer. Then I’ll come to see you. It was great fun while it lasted. I don’t think I ever enjoyed a morning as much. There are things about it I don’t understand—where we were found, for instance. I thought we fell on an island. Didn’t you? I’ll write again when I can steal time. It’s the least I can do, and we’re pals. Aren’t we? Get well as quickly as you can and we’ll fly again. Is the ’plane fixed?” That was all. It stopped abruptly like that.

She wanted to fly with him again. He chuckled. A little thing like falling out of the sky would not damp her enthusiasm, and fear seemed to have no place in her vocabulary. She was the most utterly daring girl he had ever met, and the most reckless of consequences. He perceived her similarity to himself.

“Mr. La Mothe and Mr. Cantor to see you,” announced a servant.

“Send them up,” Potter directed, fumbling in his memory for the name Cantor, recollecting it was the chap he had met at the Country Club who had letters of introduction to him.

La Mothe and Cantor entered. Potter looked first at Cantor. There was something about the man, something that made his memory itch. He had seen Cantor somewhere, but where? What was there about the man? He noticed that Cantor scrutinized him tensely. It was as if the man were searching for something, something that he was afraid to find.

“Greetings, Potter,” said La Mothe. “You’re looking bang-up for a fellow that was all fitted to a coffin. We were taking up a subscription to send you a floral pillow.... You remember Cantor?”

“Yes,” said Potter, extending his hand. “You’re making quite a stay in Detroit.”

“He’s joined the lodge,” La Mothe remarked. “Shouldn’t be surprised if he squatted. Eh, Cantor?”

“I find Detroit very attractive, especially to a business man,” said Cantor. “I’ve even thought of making it my home.”

“That’s about the best compliment you could pay the city,” said Potter, but in his mind he was saying over and over: “What is it? What is there about him? Where does he fit in?”

“I’ve never had an opportunity to present some letters I have from friends of yours, Mr. Waite. But here they are.”

“From Tom Herkimer and George Striker, eh?” said Potter, glancing over the notes. “They seem to be rather strong for you. I’m not very useful as an acquaintance just now, but as soon as I’m on my feet—”

“As soon as you’re on your feet,” said La Mothe, “he’ll have you chaperoning him through your plant. He’s a regular factory hound. Never saw a man so keen on factories.”

“I’m interested in mill-work and manufacturing efficiency,” said Cantor. “It’s an important part of my business.”

“I’d say it was all of your business,” said La Mothe, with a laugh. “I’ll bet he could draw from memory the plans of half the plants in Detroit.”

Cantor smiled.

“Speaking of plants,” said La Mothe, “things are getting a little thick. I was just talking to Weston, of the Structural Steel. He said they’d put armed guards all around the plant. Found explosives in the coal, and now they’re sorting over every chunk of coal that comes in. They’re making shrapnel-cases, you know.... Kraemer’s friend, the Kaiser, is doing it, I suppose.”

“Dirty business,” Cantor said, easily. “Trouble developed last week in the Delmont Machine Company’s shops. They found somebody had put emery in the bearings.”

“Any war news?” asked Potter.

“Nothing big since Warsaw fell. Looks as if Russia was about done,” La Mothe said.

“The war’s going into its second year,” said Cantor. “Who thought it could last a year?”

“Looks as if we might have a little war of our own one of these days. Mexico’s in need of a cleaning up,” La Mothe said.

“It’s been Germany’s year,” Potter said. “Only for the Marne—”

“It looks as if she couldn’t be beaten,” said Cantor.

“She’s got to be beaten,” Potter replied. “The sort of thing Germany stands for to-day has got to be wiped out—wiped clean off the slate.”

“Hang the war!” La Mothe said, impatiently. “Can’t we talk about anything else? When does the sawbones tell you you can come out and play with the boys, Potter?”

“In a week or two now.”

“We’ll have to pull a party for you. Welcome you back and all that. The crowd’ll be glad to see you around.”

“I’m going to work,” Potter said.

“Whoop!” exclaimed La Mothe. “At what and wherefore?”

“Fred,” Potter said, “I want to talk things over with you and some of the boys. I’m going to need your help—all the fellows who are in the automobile game. I’ve laid around for three months with nothing to do but think, and I’m here to say that the old stuff doesn’t go. We’ve got to take off our coats and get to work.”

“At what?” said La Mothe.

“Aeroplanes,” said Potter.

“I thought you had about all the aeroplane that was coming to you. Why aeroplanes?”

“The country’s going to need them, and Detroit’s got to make the engines. You seemed to be surprised that the war had lasted a year, Mr. Cantor. My idea is that it’s just begun. It’ll spread, and it will spread to us. We’ll be in it.”

“Rats!” said La Mothe; but Potter was aware of Cantor’s close scrutiny, and of an expression on the older man’s face which baffled solution.

“Germany has run wild with the notion of grabbing the world,” Potter said. “If she gets away with Europe we’ll come next.”

“Fat chance. Germany doesn’t want any of our action. Look how she backed down on the submarine stuff.”

“You’ve got the old notion, Fred, that nobody can get at us and that we can lick all creation. If Germany’s hands were free she could land an army on our coast, and before we could start to get ready to fight we’d be licked. We’re like cake in an unlocked cupboard, and Germany’s a hungry boy. We’d be gobbled.”

“Oh, say, Potter—”

“Think it over. The day’ll come when this country will need thousands upon thousands of aeroplanes—all of a sudden. When it comes it’ll be sudden, and we’ll be caught. We won’t have an army, we won’t have equipment—and we won’t have aeroplanes, which will be harder to get than anything else. That’s going to be my business. Getting ready for the aeroplane end of it. And I want you fellows to help.”

“You’ve been laying around too much, Potter. You’ve been sick, that’s what’s the matter with you.”

Potter shrugged his shoulders. “Think about it, anyhow, will you, Fred? Great heavens! you’ve got brains.”

“Much ’bliged,” said Fred. “Cantor, let’s be wiggling on. We’re exciting the invalid. See you again soon, old man,” La Mothe said.

Cantor stood up and extended his hand. “When you’re around again,” he said, “I’m going to bother you. You interest me—about the aeroplanes.... And I want to see your plant. Making munitions, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Potter, “glad to show you around.” He paused, and his eyes darkened. He fixed them on Cantor and said, suddenly, “You weren’t fishing up at the Flats about the time I was hurt, were you—back in the marsh?”

“Flats? No. What are the Flats, Mr. Waite?” Little points of white appeared at the comers of his jaw. Potter noticed them.

“It’s nothing. I guess you got mixed up in a dream of mine.”

“Dreams are queer,” said Cantor, flatly.

“Damn vivid dream, though,” said Potter. “Come again, fellows. My regards to the crowd.”

CHAPTER VIII

Between the date of Potter Waite’s injury and the first of the new year tremendous events occurred at home and abroad, and among the most tremendous, the most hopeful to Potter, and to Americans who loved and feared for their country, was the birth of the thing that came to be known as the Plattsburg Idea. It was the one sign of life in an ocean of lethargy; it showed that there were men not unaffected by sinister manifestations—men who foresaw peril, men who were ready to give their abilities and their lives for the safety of the flag that waved over their prosperity. When history comes to be written the Plattsburg experiment will stand out distinct, significant—a rainbow of promise.

Inert public opinion was preparing to stir. Germany, pursuing her relentless way, chose to irritate a nation which it might have conciliated. It irritated with patent propaganda; her Bernstorffs and Dernbergs filled the public prints with their sophistry, while their paid agents were fomenting industrial unrest and achieving arson and murder. German bombs were discovered on outward-bound vessels; the German torch was applied to factory and mill. Irritation increased, became acute to such a point that Doctor Dumba, who had used his sacred station as ambassador to shield his activities as arch plotter, was dismissed and sent on his disgraced way Vienna-wards. Von Papen and Boy-Ed, red-handed, were whisked away.... The Arabic was sunk. Then it seemed that Germany hesitated on her course. Mr. Wilson patiently indited note upon note, at last wringing from the Imperial German government its solemn promise to refrain from sinking liners without warning. This was heralded and welcomed as a great victory for our diplomacy, and the country breathed more easily. The cloud threatening the thunders and lightnings of war passed around us harmlessly.

But Mr. Roosevelt would not let the country return to its sleep. His alarm-voice rang in its ears, denouncing, demanding, stirring to wakefulness.

The news from abroad had been depressing. For a year the western battle-front had stood stationary, presenting a stalemate. The heralded “big push” had failed, or what one might safely call failed. Russia was being beaten into helplessness with a million prisoners captured since May. Siberia had been stricken.

But Bernstorff and Dumba and Boy-Ed had not been without their value, as Plattsburg had not been without its value. Preparedness was in the air. It was a topic of conversation. It and the blind atrocity of the slaughter of Edith Cavell.... The President’s message in December dealt with preparedness, naval and military, and promised much. Mr. Garrison had a plan.... The inert mass of the people was no longer inert; it stirred, moved, but did not awaken. Perhaps it was vexed by nightmare visitations.... Henry Ford’s heart made his head ridiculous with the squabbling argosy aboard his peace ship.... All these things were straws indicating not only the rising of the wind, but the direction of the wind.... Potter Waite studied and appraised them at their true value.

He studied and weighed the manifestations of public consciousness in Detroit, smug, wealthy, inaccessible Detroit. Detroit was on no exposed coast; Detroit was safe from invasion; Detroit did not share the fears and the excitement of the seaboard, but went on its way manufacturing motor-cars and munitions, stoves and varnish, and piling up its wealth fantastically, spending its wealth but never able to exhaust its income. Submarine sinkings were academic affairs in Detroit; bomb plots, the incitement of labor to violent unrest, the torch of the plotter, were matters that affected her more nearly. There were those in high places who knew that the stealthy eye of Germany’s army of moles was on the city; that they tunneled underneath the city’s feet, sinister, frightful.... But Detroit did not cry for war. She demanded protection in her activities. Her German-Americans were loud in their talk. The hyphen had its definite place among them. Potter watched and saw. Like the East, the Middle-West was moving glacier-like toward a distant point. The moment would come when glacier movement became avalanche rush.

Detroit continued to fly high.

Long before the new year Potter had discarded casts, bandages, crutches; his body was as sound as ever it had been, more perfectly fit than his habits had allowed it to be for years. There had been other changes for the better—changes less easy to detect and to define. One might almost have been justified in saying that he had not gotten well of his injuries, but had been recreated. There is a spiritual rebirth which need not of necessity have anything to do with so-called morals. Any changes apparent in Potter were not due to his taking thought of moral considerations. The only change of heart he had known was with respect to his country: indifference had turned to devotion. The great alteration was that he had acquired an object in life; everything else flowed out of that.

The nature of him was the same. There were the same dynamic possibilities, the same urge to action, the same qualities which had formerly made for unrest, recklessness, restlessness. His dynamo had been creating electricity which must have outlet, and, none being provided, took what freakish, ill-considered outlet it found. The same dynamo was still generating, but its product flowed evenly, with stable force, along wires placed to carry it. What had been turbulent potentialities were harnessed; they had been harnessed by an idea, and that idea was that the needs of his country demanded a certain service of him.

He went about his work not so much enthusiastically as grimly, relentlessly. He was a man driven by an obsession; that obsession was to clear the way against his country’s call for aeroplanes. And Detroit came to the conclusion that he was mad as a March hare. There were those of his friends whose nature it was not to pronounce unpleasant words; these spoke of him as eccentric.

One man, however, seemed to take Potter seriously, and his name was Cantor. After his first call he came frequently to visit, making his desire to cultivate Potter’s friendship plainly apparent. Cantor was, Potter judged, in the neighborhood of thirty-five; a man of wide experience, whose eyes had seen most of the world with a distinctness which enabled him to talk of it as no mere globe-trotter could talk. In spite of a feeling, not so much of suspicion as of questioning, with which Potter regarded Cantor at first, he found himself attracted by the man. This was due, in its inception, doubtless to Cantor’s attitude toward Potter’s object in life. There was no doubt that Cantor accepted Potter’s clearness of vision and was deeply interested in his plans. This, an oasis of belief in a desert of skepticism, went far. Then the man had undoubted charm. He was handsome; his manners were distinguished and wholesome, though a trifle foreign; his brain was acute, active; his wit was a joy. In short, he was an unsurpassed companion for a house-bound man. Potter found himself liking Cantor more and more. He had never possessed a close friend, a chum. It seemed as if Cantor were to be a successful aspirant to that position.

But of all the events of that period the one which had, perhaps, most significance was the return of Hildegarde von Essen. Potter was being, had been, modified by a number of momentous happenings whose effects he was able himself to see. Hildegarde was to modify him without his perceiving it. And it may be asserted that her modification was the most profound, far-reaching of all. It is the intent of Nature that the life of man shall stretch over many years. A third of these years, say twenty-five, are used up in bringing him to man’s stature and in equipping him with mental tools to carry on the trade of living. At the end of this period he stands balanced in the doorway, ready to step out into the jostle. It is usually at this moment that a woman intervenes. The most critical event of any man’s career is the advent of some woman. This point may be argued and combated, but not successfully. It is critical because it is the major point of departure in his journey. The character of this woman touches every instant remaining in the man’s life, either for good or ill. And it is all a matter of chance! Here Nature does not plan. One might almost accuse her of being sardonic. She shuts her eyes, shuffles together a multitude of young men and young women, themselves blindfolded, and then gives the word, “Choose your partners.” Perhaps that is the fun Olympus gets out of godship. It may be the whole thing is some Olympian gamble. Upon this blind scramble depends the future of the race!

The marvel of it is that so many grasp possible partners.

Men are educated to choose a profession or business; they are educated to enter a drawing-room; they are educated to choose a hat or a cravat. But to choose a wife—that choice which is so paramount that one might almost say it is the one choosing of his life, is not a choice of educated reason, but is a blind snatch into a grab-bag. The worst of it is that he cannot refuse to grab. Nature has seen to that. For the perpetuation of the race she has given him sex, and sex may bless him or damn him, she cares little which, so long as she produces another generation. It forces him into the game.

Potter had news of Hildegarde’s return from Hildegarde in person. He was working in the old hangar—the one to which she had come looking like a fairy prince on the day of their disastrous flight. It was now his headquarters, enlarged to accommodate his needs. The building housed a reasonably complete machine-shop, drafting-room, a combination technical library, office, and study, as well as the rebuilt hydro-aeroplane for which it had been constructed originally. Here Potter worked, and here his world was content to leave him alone with his fad. Few visitors came, and these found themselves unwelcome, for Potter was busy. He was designing a motor that would be efficient to drive the battle-planes of his country to victory.

He stood now coatless, eyes protected by a green shade, attention fixed upon his drafting-table. He had not heard the stopping of a motor-car, nor was his concentration interrupted by the unceremonious opening of the door.

“What’s the use pretending you don’t know I’m here?” said Hildegarde.

Potter turned abruptly and found himself without words. He was not content to extend one hand, but must stretch out both, ink-stained though they were, and she took them boyishly.

“I just got home this morning,” she said. “Dad said I couldn’t come and wouldn’t send me any money, so I got a man to pawn some things and ran away. I don’t think the man gave me all the money he got—quite. Dad was furious. He almost busted. As soon as he’d shouted himself into a state of collapse and rushed out of the house I called your house on the telephone. They said you were here, so I got in my car and came—and aren’t you going to say anything?”

“It’s you,” his lips said, stupidly enough, but his eyes must have been more eloquent, for Hildegarde said, with satisfaction, “You are glad to see me.”

He was thinking to himself that his memory was inefficient, for it had not retained so many of the delights of her reality; it had forgotten the way her little ears cuddled into her unruly hair; it had forgotten that daring, challenging glint in her blue eyes; he had forgotten something of that determined line of her brows—a determined line which did not give an expression of severity. He had recalled her general appearance as one of some pertness; it was not pertness, he saw, but keenness. She had seemed a little girl—a rather naughty, wilful, impertinent little girl; that seeming of youth was there, but it was no longer the youth of the little girl with whom one plays house—it was the youth of the girl on the point of womanhood with whom one would desire to keep house. She had been alluring, intriguing, as he remembered her; in reality she was enchanting, compelling, startling. She excited the imagination, not physically, but adventurously. Potter had once compared her to a dancing flame; he approved that comparison. The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from studying Hildegarde was that life in her vicinity would be far from uneventful. She was full of dynamic promise.

“I am glad to see you,” he said, letting her hands go with reluctance. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

“How nice! I’ve been thinking about you—wondering how you came out of it ... if your nose was flattened or one leg shorter than the other. Why, you don’t look as if you had been smashed all to pieces.” She laughed gaily.

“I’ll try to limp,” he suggested, “if it will please you.”

She drew her shoulders together and became serious. “I was afraid,” she said. “I couldn’t bear to think you—were not the way you used to be. If you had been crippled—and it was my fault! That’s why I came so quickly. I wanted to know. You see, I didn’t know anything—except that you were alive.”

“On the whole, I think I benefited,” he said.

She looked at him quickly, appraisingly. “Yes,” she said, “you have benefited. You look different, somehow, and better. There was something about you before that made me feel uneasy—not exactly comfortable. Like a panther in a cage.” She laughed lightly at her simile. “You seemed to be pacing up and down and glaring at the world. That is gone.... Yes, and you’ve been behaving yourself, taking better care of yourself.”

“Yes,” he said. “My address is no longer the Pontchartrain bar—and I’ve got a job.”

“That satisfies you?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Something happened. Something has made a great change in you. What was it? I’m interested, you know.”

“The thing that happened was the necessity for filling in several months’ time while I lay on my back. It was necessary to think quite a little.”

“What did you think about?”

“The United States of America,” he said, “mainly.”

“I don’t understand. Are you joking?”

“No,” he said, so seriously that she knew he spoke of a momentous thing in his life. “It was the result of the war, I suppose, and of little things which derived from the war. The first thing I discovered was that I was a sort of Nolan—a man without a country. Have you read that book?”

“Yes.”

“I hadn’t done what Nolan did. I’d just neglected my country utterly. I hadn’t bothered with it. Just before I was hurt a man asked me if I loved my country, and that rather started things.... I don’t go around talking this sort of thing to everybody,” he said with sudden reserve.

“Of course not.”

“Have you ever thought much about it?”

“No—I think not. I’ve rather taken the country for granted, except when Dad has bellowed about the fatherland and that sort of thing. Then I’ve been stirred up a little. Irritated, I guess the word is. I haven’t been an out-and-out American, but I haven’t been anything else. That’s all.... Like father, for instance. His father was chased out of Germany in ’forty-eight, and you’d think Dad would have a grudge against it. But he hasn’t. He gets sentimental about Germany. He isn’t an American at all, though he was born here ... and that never seemed right to me.”

Potter nodded. “He’s not alone, of course, and it is a dangerous condition.... Well, the thing that happened to me was that I learned something about the United States, and the first thing I knew I was mighty strong for it.”

“And what are you doing here—with all these drawings and this machinery?”

“Aeroplanes,” he said. “Maybe you can understand what I’m doing. Nobody else seems to.... Doesn’t it seem to you that we’ve got to get into this war?”

“I haven’t thought much about that—not a great deal. But nobody seems to want war.”

“No. We’re smug and satisfied and cocksure. But I think we will be forced into it. We can’t stand everything. And if we go in it will be a tremendous thing—for which we won’t be ready. We’ll be in the position of a man with a hand-saw who is suddenly compelled to cut down a forest. We’ll have to do everything after the thing comes—raise an army and equip it. And we’ll need aeroplanes by the thousands.... That’s what I’m doing—getting ready for the time when we need aeroplanes. That is, I’m doing what I can to help.”

“And you’re not getting much help or sympathy,” she said.

He smiled wryly. “But I’m going ahead, just the same. I hope we never need them. Maybe we can stay out of it, and maybe we will stay out of it—but I’m going to stick to this game until I know. Because,” he said, with a sudden lighting of the face, a glow of enthusiasm from his eyes, “it’s the best thing I can do for the country—and I want to do my best for it.”

She touched his arm lightly and in her eyes was a glow caught from his own. “It’s fine,” she said. “I think I understand. I’m going to understand better. I guess I’ll be an American, too.”

There was a rap on the door, and Potter, thinking it was one of his machinists, called to come in. Cantor entered, hesitated when he saw Hildegarde.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t know you were engaged.”

“Come in, Cantor.... This is Miss von Essen. You know her father, I think.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Cantor, advancing, a graceful, forceful, pleasing figure. “I didn’t know Miss von Essen had returned.” His eyes were fixed upon her boldly, but not offensively—admiringly. “I have heard much of Miss von Essen, and even saw her once at a distance. Since then I have hoped it might be my privilege to be presented to her.”

Even as he spoke he was studying her face intently. He turned a sharp glance upon Potter, and apparently was satisfied. In spite of his well-trained face and manner, he had been unable to conceal a trace of embarrassment, of uneasiness. It had passed unnoticed by Potter. Hildegarde had set it down to her unexpected presence.

“Cantor is about all the company I have here,” Potter said.

“I shall come more frequently now if surprises like this are to be expected.”

Potter turned to Hildegarde. “It was no end good of you to come,” he said, “but really, you know, you shouldn’t.... And you mustn’t come again.”

“I shall,” she said, defiantly, “whenever I want to.”

“I’ll have to lock the door,” Potter laughed. “You know what affection her father has for me, Cantor.”

“Indeed, yes.... But fathers don’t learn everything.”

Potter pressed his lips together, for this hint of something clandestine in his relations with Hildegarde affronted him. He said nothing.

Then the door burst open and Herman von Essen rushed into the room, bristling, panting. He stopped, glared at the little group, and pointed a trembling finger at Hildegarde. “There you are.... I had you watched. I knew you would come here.... It is like you, disgracing yourself. Have you no brains? Rushing here to this man that has made your name common in the whole city.... Out of here, out of here while I attend to him!” He advanced threateningly, but Hildegarde did not move, only eyed him with level contempt. “You,” he raved at Potter, “you entice my daughter!... By God! I’ll show you!...” He advanced again, burly fists doubled, Bismarck-like face purple and distorted by rage.

At the instant when it seemed the furious German would rush upon Potter, Cantor took one step forward and spoke. His voice was incisive, cold, compelling. It cut through von Essen’s rage to his consciousness and halted him. “Von Essen,” said Cantor, “you forget yourself.” That was all. He stood very straight, heels together, shoulders squared—the attitude of an officer facing his company.

Von Essen stopped, and his rage dropped from him as if it had been some false face which could flutter to the ground. He was compelled. Cantor’s cool voice had a surprising, a powerful effect. “I—” he faltered, seeming to grow smaller of stature, to wilt.

“You will take your daughter home,” said Cantor, still in that cool, commanding voice, “and you will treat her as a gentleman treats a lady. Am I understood?”

Von Essen nodded. He was inarticulate.

“See to it,” Cantor said. “Miss von Essen.” He bowed to Hildegarde, and, walking to the door, held it open for her, standing cold and straight while she passed her father and came toward him.

Von Essen followed. He had the appearance of a man suddenly caved in.

Hildegarde paused in the door and turned. “I can’t ask you to pardon him,” she said. “I shall come again.” Then she preceded her father through the door.

Cantor closed it and smiled grimly. “You need have no anxiety over Miss von Essen,” he said.

Potter shook his head. “That gets me,” he said. “How do you do it, Cantor? In another minute I’d have had to thrash that old bounder.... I’m much obliged for the miracle.”

“He needs a little taking down,” Cantor said, contemptuously. “These rich German-Americans get too cocky sometimes. They have to be shown.”

“I’d like to have your formula,” said Potter.

Cantor changed the subject. “How’s the motor coming?”

“Slowly.”

“I haven’t seen the drawings,” Cantor suggested. “I’m interested, you know.”

“I’d like to show them to you,” Potter replied, “but I’m not showing them to anybody. I feel as if it were government work, you know. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

“Perfectly. I shouldn’t have suggested it.... Just dropped in to ask you to come down to the club to dinner to-night.”

“Thanks. I’ll show up early. Want a game of handball and a shower? Take me on?”

“You’ve been beating me too regularly, but I’ll let you do it again. Maybe La Mothe and O’Mera will be around.”

Cantor walked out. As he got into his car he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

CHAPTER IX

As the door of the hangar closed behind them Herman von Essen seized Hildegarde’s arm roughly and propelled her toward his waiting limousine. He was a burly, powerful man and lifted her almost from the ground. She presented a spectacle similar to that of a naughty little girl being led by the ear; she trotted along on tiptoe with a consciousness that she offered a most undignified spectacle. People fail to reckon with the sense of dignity of the young; it is very strong, and there is no surer way to kindle their fury than to make them appear undignified.

Hildegarde’s cheeks were white, but her eyes, half closed, were cold light flashed in reflection from steel; she bit her lip to restrain a cry of pain. Her father breathed heavily, noisily. She was aware that the chauffeur, out of the corner of his eye, missed nothing of the spectacle.

“Let go my arm!” she said, fiercely.

He only shook her a little and shoved her forward.

“You’re hurting my arm! Let go!”

She wanted to strike him, to scream, to bite and scratch, but she knew she was helpless in his great hands. She knew it was futile to struggle with him or to appeal to him, she knew his rage was the equal of her own in intensity, but she knew it was a brutal rage, a rage which, if further provoked, might relieve itself by some unthinkable action.... He was capable of thrashing her. She knew it, but it was not fear of him that held her passive; it was the effort to maintain some vestige of dignity.

He pushed her to the step of the car and, reaching over her shoulder, jerked open the door.

“My car—is here,” she said.

He did not reply, but shoved her headlong into the limousine. She fell on hands and knees, and he did not help her to arise. She scrambled to her feet and sat in the corner of the seat, pressing as far away from her father as possible, avoiding any contact with him. He shut the door with a slam and was silent except for his noisy breathing.

Both of them looked straight ahead, and no word was spoken during the drive to their home. When the car stopped and the chauffeur opened the door, von Essen lumbered out and stood waiting.

“Get out,” he said, roughly, not offering to assist her.

She stepped out, drawing away from him as she passed, and ran up the steps.

“Wait,” he commanded, and she stopped. He approached her and reached again for her arm, but she avoided him.

“Don’t touch me!... Don’t dare to touch me!” she panted.

“Go to your room,” he ordered. “Don’t leave it without my permission, or I’ll lock you in.... Don’t leave this house again. Don’t step out of the door. If you do—”

She turned and walked away from him. She wanted to run, but would not allow herself to run. She walked slowly, shoulders squared, head up proudly. She did not hurry as she traversed the hall and ascended the stairs, nor as she opened the door of her room. She entered, closed the door gently—and locked it. Then she stood quite still, white and slender, with a look on her face not good to see on the face of a young girl. Her fists were clenched, her arms held tense and straight at her sides. There was no tear or sign of tear in her eyes. She looked not like a living flame now, but like a slender image of steel heated to whiteness.

“I hate him,” she said, slowly, not passionately, but coldly, with calculation. Then she repeated it, “I hate him.... I hate him.”

She took off hat and wraps and let them fall to the floor, then walked across the room to her dressing-table and looked at herself in its mirror. She saw how pinched and white and strained she looked, and bit her lip.... On the dressing-table in a silver frame was a photograph, the photograph of a woman still young. It was a strong face, a gentle face, a face that in some vague way showed that the spirit within had not been satisfied or happy. Hildegarde lifted it in her hands.

“You married him,” she said, in a whisper. “Married him.... You lived with him of your own accord—for years.... How could you? How could you?”

Hildegarde did not know that she herself was the answer to that question. Born within a year of her mother’s marriage, she had tied her mother to that home and to the man who was the father of the child. It had not taken years to disillusion Marcia von Essen with respect to her husband; the first trying hours of marital life had sufficed to show her the sort of man to whom she had given herself, for he had shown her none of that gentleness, that consideration, that tenderness that form so sure a foundation for the coming years. More marriages are wrecked within twenty-four hours of the ceremony than are wrecked in the succeeding twenty-four years. Marcia von Essen’s was one of these.... She might have separated herself from him almost at the beginning of their marriage, but time was not given her to catch her breath and form the resolution when was forced upon her the knowledge that her thought must include a third being. So she remained, and so, for Hildegarde’s sake, she endured the years. “How could you?” Hildegarde asked. The photograph might have replied, “For you, my daughter.”

Hildegarde put down her mother’s picture and sat down on the rounding seat in the bay window. Her posture was girlish, childish; back against the wall, feet on the cushion, she drew her knees under her chin and stared out at the snow-covered lawn, the wealth of shrubs swathed in white, down the slope to the barren expanse of frozen lake. Her thoughts were dangerous thoughts, and to a reckless, turbulent soul thoughts likely to take material shape in rash action.

“I won’t stand it,” she said, in a whisper. “She had to live with him, but I don’t.”

That resolution was made. All that remained was to hit upon the means to carry it out. She would leave her home and her father, but how? And how could she make it certain that he could not follow her and drag her back? For drag her back he would, she knew.

She must have help; she must have a place to go. Arrangements must be made outside that house for her reception, and she could not go out to make them—and she was penniless!

“He’d help me,” she said, suddenly. “He’s got to.” The he was Potter Waite.

It was not with love that she turned to Potter, for she did not love him. She was not a girl given to sudden, unstable infatuations for young men. But she liked him, she trusted him. Events had coupled them in a manner which compelled her to think of him as she thought of no other young man.... She would ask him to help, to find some way, to devise some expedient. Potter was only a means to an end in this affair—he was not the end. She did not plan to elope with this young man; indeed, that idea never entered her hot little head.

She went to her desk and wrote:

“Dear Potter,—I can’t stand it any longer. I sha’n’t live another day with my father. He’s a savage and I’m afraid of him.” She was not in the least afraid of him, but feminine instinct told her this would be an appealing touch. Her hand traveled to the arm her father had clutched and she became conscious that it pained her. She stood up and removed her waist to examine the arm. It was bruised, swollen, rapidly blackening, and the marks of his ruthless fingers were plain. She sat down to write again. “My arm,” she wrote, “is nearly wrenched off, and you can see the mark of every one of his fingers on it. I’m locked in my room. Won’t you help me get away? My room is on the lake side of the house, the corner with the tower. If you’ll help me, come to-morrow night about ten, and be careful. I’ll be watching out of my window for you, and I’ll be all ready. I won’t stand it another day.”

She signed this, sealed it, and affixed a stamp. Then she replaced her waist and concealed the note in her bosom.

“He’ll have sense enough to know what to do.” she told herself.

She tried to read, but could not, and hurled the book across the room angrily. She could do nothing but brood and toy with her anger, keeping it alive and pouring fuel upon its flames. Again she occupied the window-seat and stared out at the wintry landscape.

Dinner hour came, but she did not leave her room. She could not bear the thought of sitting at the same table with her father, of seeing him, of breathing the same air he breathed. Nor did he summon her. She did not expect him to send a tray to her room; that would be a courtesy so utterly foreign to him that she did not even give it a thought. Besides, she was not hungry. She could not have eaten. So she sat and waited—waited for darkness and for that stillness which tells of a sleeping house. When it came she would steal out of her room and out of the house to the near-by mail-box to post her letter to Potter Waite.

Hours went by. The house was very still. Though she opened the door a crack and listened, she could not hear a sound. It was after ten o’clock, and her father was probably at the Harmonie Society drinking beer and smoking those pudgy black cigars without which he was seldom seen. She threw a wrap over her head and tiptoed out of the room and down the stairs. Very cautiously she passed along the hall, but stopped before she reached the door of the library, for the room was lighted. She drew against the wall and stood very still, listening. Some one was there, for she heard voices.

Step by step she drew nearer, and the voices became more distinct, her father’s voice and the voice of a stranger. She believed it to be a stranger, for she did not recognize it. Both voices were muffled by the walls and hangings, yet she could overhear what was said, if not wholly, at least in major part.

“Boy-Ed and von Papen were clumsy fools,” said the strange voice, “and this man Paul Koenig, that got himself arrested the other day, wasn’t much better. But those things were to be expected. It wasn’t the ridiculous Secret Service of this idiotic country that did it, even then. It was English agents.”

Hildegarde realized suddenly that German was being spoken. It had not surprised her or caught her attention in the beginning, for she was accustomed to hear as much German spoken in that house as English.

“What do you want of me now?” she heard her father ask.

The stranger did not reply directly to the question. “Our men have done pretty good work so far, but we must do much better. Our greatest success has been in holding together the Germans here and in creating in their minds a proper attitude toward the fatherland. You and men like you have been invaluable there. But we must take more vigorous steps. A little has been done. We’ve stirred up a lot of unrest, and we have the pacifists working nicely.” He chuckled. “That I. W. W. organization was made to our order.” He paused a moment, and then said, significantly, “And there is quite a satisfying number of tons of munitions that have exploded here in America—instead of over the trenches occupied by our army.”

“Yes,” said von Essen, “but what do you want of me?”

“More help, of course. You recognize your duty to the fatherland?”

“Naturally,” said von Essen.

“Propaganda and singing societies aren’t going to win this war for us,” said the stranger, flatly. “For one thing, millions of tons of iron ore are coming down these lakes, through the Sault Sainte Marie locks, through the St. Clair ship-canal. That ore makes rifles and cannon and shells for the Allies. It would be a great service to the Emperor to interfere with that traffic, and the surest way is to—er—discontinue the use of the canals. That’s one thing. Then Detroit is manufacturing more and more munitions, and motor-trucks, and other things to help the enemy. There’s a fine bit of work to be done right here. You can be most useful here. You have influence, and a man in your position will go without suspicion. Do you see?”

“I see,” said von Essen, gruffly, “but I’m not going to mix into such matters. I want to see the fatherland win. I’m a German. But I haven’t any intention of getting stood up against a wall and being shot.”

“Nonsense! You’ll be telling me you have scruples against such a thing next. And you haven’t.”

“I haven’t,” said von Essen. “I’d like to see every munition-plant in America blown to hell.”

“Excellent so far.... When this war is over a German is going to be an envied man in this world. Once a man boasted that he was a Roman citizen; after we are through he’ll boast that he’s a German citizen. Our Emperor knows how to reward service—either with money or with honors.”

“I don’t need the Emperor’s money,” said von Essen.

“But the honors, eh? Suppose you should be recalled to the fatherland and ennobled, eh? Made a count, let us say? You have the wealth to support the position.”

“Uh!” grunted von Essen.

“But to wear honors one must earn them. You have been picked because you are the right man. We do not make mistakes. We need you.”

“No,” said von Essen, stubbornly.

“Listen, Herr von Essen,” said the stranger, his voice changing its tone from silkiness to something bordering on arrogance. “Last Thursday you rode to the city in your limousine with Mr. Bradley. I can repeat to you every word of your conversation. It was an unimportant conversation, but I know what was said. I can tell you what you had for dinner two weeks ago, and what you will have to-morrow. I can tell you every movement you have made for months.”

“Well,” said von Essen, uneasily.

“I have not wasted time on you for nothing. I say we need you—and you are going to do what you are told.”

“No. Why should I run risks? I’m willing to help in a reasonable way, but this dynamiting business—”

“Out of several hundred men serving the Emperor in this country, half a dozen have been caught. There is no risk, and there will be great gain. It is not for you to refuse or accept. You have your orders, Herr von Essen.”

“You can’t give me orders. I’m an American citizen—”

“Bosh!... Last week there was an explosion in an armory in a Canadian town not far from here. It did quite a satisfactory bit of damage. I’m sure the Emperor will appreciate it.”

“That armory explosion—did you arrange that?”

“I?... Oh no, Herr von Essen! You did.”

“I! You’re crazy.”

“The records show—our secret records. You have the credit there.... Now, Herr von Essen, will you obey orders?”

“No. What do your secret records matter to me?”

“If I put information in the hands of the clumsy American agents that Herr von Essen is excessively pro-German and that it might be well to inquire where he was the night of that so-called outrage, they might be interested, eh?... And if it was hinted that a search of your premises would unearth a considerable quantity of explosives, and some extremely novel and effective bombs and infernal machines?... I should hate to do that, Herr.”

“But I was not where you say on that night—that Friday night.”

“No, Herr von Essen? Shall I tell you where you were? You were with me. Alone with me, as I took excellent pains to see you would be. Nobody knows where you were but myself—and I would be unable to come to your assistance, of course. I’m afraid there would be evidence directly against you, however. It would look black for you if your chauffeur were to swear that he carried you to a point on the river and saw you meet two other men, and that you had baggage which you carried, oh, so carefully. Eh? And if he saw you cross the river, partly on the ice and partly with boats? It would look bad.”

Hildegarde heard her father burst into a torrent of imprecation, frightened imprecation. She was even sorry for him. Yet she felt a malicious satisfaction. He was trapped, neatly trapped, and he was being made to suffer. She approved of that.

“Well?” demanded the stranger when von Essen became quiet again.

“You couldn’t.... It wouldn’t be safe for you. I should describe you and tell—”

“And how long would you continue to live after that? Give a moment’s thought to that point.”

“Is that explosive in this house?”

“Plenty of it.”

Yon Essen groaned. “What do you want me to do?”

“Whatever you are told. You’ll get over this first nervousness soon—and you’ll quite enjoy yourself. Really, there’s a satisfaction in our work—when it is successful. Are you going to be reasonable?”

Von Essen made some reply unintelligible to Hildegarde, but which evidently was satisfactory to the stranger. “We’ll call it settled, then,” the latter said. “I’m pleased for your sake. You will get your orders in due time. In the mean while, stand ready at all times to obey. Am I understood?”

“Yes,” said von Essen, in a voice from which all arrogance, all courage was gone, “I understand.”

Hildegarde was filled with an intense curiosity to see the man who had tamed and trapped her father. The thing had happened so unexpectedly, and she had followed the conversation with such interest, that she had not had time to consider other than the immediate aspects of it. She did not yet consider her father as a traitor to his country, nor go deeply into the meaning of the words she had overheard. But she did want to see that man. She took a careful step forward, and another. She would peer through the door and then withdraw.

She took one more step; then something descended over her head, a hand covered her mouth, and she was lifted bodily from her feet. There was no sound. Whoever had seized her carried her silently to the stairs, up to the second floor, opened a door, and set her within. The door closed quickly, the key turned on the outside, and she was free and alone. She snatched the cloth from her head. It was her own room!

She placed her hand against the door to steady herself while she collected her senses. Who had seized her? Not her father, not the stranger. It had been no man of her father’s who had done so. It must have been some one in the service of the stranger, but some one employed in the von Essen household; some one familiar with it; some one who knew without hesitation where her own room was. It was startling, terrifying. She tottered across to her bed and threw herself upon it, nerves aflutter. Hildegarde was not given to nerves, but the tenseness of her situation as she had stood listening to her father and the stranger, with its unexpressed threat of danger, then the sudden, stifling, paralyzing climax of her seizure by unseen hands, had been sufficient to shock steadier fortitude than her own.

She did not give way to hysterics; did not whimper with fear as some girls might have done. The strange thing is that she was not afraid. It was not fear she felt so much as bewilderment, a certain dread of the unknown, a sense of something sinister impending.

She lay quietly struggling for self-control, and gradually it came to her. She sat up and looked about her. Then she went to her door and tried it. It was not locked. This was startling, for she had heard distinctly the key turned in the lock. Whoever had placed her in her room had crept back to unlock the door.

She tried to consider the events calmly, first in their bearing upon herself. She had been caught eavesdropping, effectively interrupted, but not more ungently than the circumstances had demanded. She had not been hurt; apparently there was neither desire nor intention to hurt her.... As yet. But she had heard matters not safe to overhear. Possibly her assailant knew how much she had overheard; possibly he had come upon her suddenly and had acted as suddenly. In that event he would not know how long she had been there nor what she knew. That would make for safety. Somehow that phase did not worry her.

Then she reviewed the conversation at which she had been an unseen auditor. Its meaning was plain to her. Her father was in communication with sinister agencies, was now the tool of such agencies. She had known him to be frantically pro-German, but that he had been an active participant in the plots and propaganda which filled the papers and which people were coming to understand daily as more and more of a menace to the well-being of their country, she had not imagined. And now Herman von Essen was to go farther; he was, so to speak, initiated into the inner ring of German intrigue, that inner ring commissioned by a conscienceless power to carry out unspeakable designs against a friendly, unsuspicious people! In short, she was the daughter of a traitor; of the same blood that flowed in the veins of a man plotting treason against the flag under which he had lived and prospered and to which his allegiance had been sworn.... She had hated her father before, she despised him now. She was filled with shame, deep, bitter, biting shame....

She asked herself what ought she to do, what could she do? She hated Germany because she believed it was Germany that had produced her father and his like. Because she had heard disloyal talk from her father’s lips, she had become impetuously, girlishly loyal to the United States.... But in the condition that faced her, what could she do? Where lay her duty? It was a question too complex for her immaturity. She answered it by avoiding it. Her determination was the determination she had reached earlier in the day—to go away. Now her going away took on a new significance. It took on the quality of running away to avoid responsibility, to avoid answering a question to which she could see no answer.

Once more she put on her coat and hat and crept out into the dark hall. The clock had struck midnight. This time she reached the outer door without interruption, shot back its bolt, and stepped out into the night. She ran to the street, fearful lest she should be stopped even now, and felt a great surge of relief as she dropped her note to Potter Waite into the mail-box. Then she turned, and with as great caution made her way back to her room, locked the door—a thing she had never been accustomed to do—and retired.

CHAPTER X

It was mid-afternoon when Hildegarde’s note came to Potter at the hangar. He read it, reread it, and there was no more work for him that day. With the letter in his hands he left his drawing-board and went into his tiny office, where he sat down to consider it. Perhaps not so much to consider the letter as to consider Hildegarde herself.

There was a note in the letter to which he responded instantly—an arousing note, a reckless note, which called to pulsating life that heedlessness of consequences which had always been so characteristic of him. He could see her writing in white heat; could picture her as she sat at her desk with the smolder of rage in her eyes. They two were in perfect sympathy, matching daring with daring, rashness with rashness, unrest with unrest. Both were driven by spirits that scorned repose, and a hunger for untrammeled freedom of action. Fires burned in both of them which threatened constantly to burst all restraints. It required no mental effort on Potter’s part to understand Hildegarde; he had but to look into his own mental mirror and what he saw there reflected her as well.

One point required no consideration—whether or not he would obey her summons. That he would go was natural, inevitable. Had that call come from an utter stranger he would have responded because there was something in him that would have carried him to the spot. But something stronger than this natural urge of adventuresomeness called him to Hildegarde, for regarding her he had reached an ultimate conclusion. As he sat with her letter in his hands he knew it was a conclusion from which he would never waver; that a thing had happened to him which was final; that something within him had taken a stand from which there could be no recession. This conclusion was that Hildegarde von Essen was the woman produced by the ages for him and for him alone. There was an element of fatality in his attitude, some fragment of primitive belief in predestination. She had come into his life, and never could be gotten out of it. He felt, somehow, that nothing could keep them apart.... He loved as he did other things, recklessly, unrestrainedly, perhaps with something of primitive savagery.

Rage mixed with his other emotions. Herman von Essen had handled her ungently; had pawed her about, perhaps, with those huge, unsightly hands of his. The mark of his every finger was on her arm, she said.... Well, he would never do it again. Potter wanted to go to the man and batter him to a pleading mass of blood and bruises. Vaguely he hoped von Essen would discover him when he came for Hildegarde. That would be his opportunity.

The thing that required thought of him was what he should do with her when he had taken her away from her father’s house. The obvious solution did not occur to him at once—because it was so obvious; because, perhaps, it was the thing he so burningly desired.... Suddenly he leaped to his feet, his eyes shining, his soul uplifted with sudden joy. He would marry her; he would take her for his own. That was a solution of all their problems.... In it he neglected to consider her—whether she shared his views of that matter or not. His sense that they were predestined for each other made for that neglect.... He would marry her, and then she would be his to guard, to protect—to love.

Potter was not one to make preparations before the event. In matters which concerned himself he was not given to looking into the future, but to doing the thing as it came to hand, and taking care of the consequences that flowed from it as they should appear. In a vague way he determined what he would do when he had helped Hildegarde to escape from her father’s house. His common-sense told him that such escapades were looked upon askance by a staid and plodding world; his innate chivalry and decency and sportsmanship—and a solicitude for Hildegarde born of his love for her—impressed it upon him that he must take some steps to safeguard her as much as would be possible from the wagging of malicious tongues. Therefore, out of hand, he determined to take her immediately to his own home, to hand her over to his mother, and then to scamper off for license and parson.... It seemed perfectly adequate.

He dined at home. As he was leaving the table he said to his mother: “I’ll be home fairly early—probably before eleven. I wonder if you will wait up for me.... There’s something rather important.”

“Of course, Potter,” she said, no little amazed, for it was the first request of this character she had ever listened to from her son.

He went out to the garage, put extra robes into his car, and drove out into the street. Hours must elapse before he could enter upon his adventure, but he could not put off the starting; he had to be about it. It was said of Potter that he was never late for anything and usually was a little ahead of time—and it was natural that he should be. He could not bear inaction, especially if some event were promised. He had to be moving toward that event, or making himself feel he was moving toward it. So he started at eight o’clock to reach a spot not half a mile away which he knew he must not reach before ten. It was his way.

He drove past the von Essen mansion, turned a mile beyond, and retraced his way. He scrutinized his watch, and it seemed to him he had made no impression whatever on the time that must elapse. For several blocks he drove at a snail’s pace, then he turned again and sped back over the icy pavement at a dangerous speed. Again he consulted his watch.... So for two hours he drove up and down impatient, eager, unable to quiet himself. He must be moving; there could be no repose.

He saw Herman von Essen’s limousine drive away from the house, half determined to follow it and settle accounts with Hildegarde’s father. He was in a state of mind which would permit of wild actions. But he did not follow; instead he applied the brakes savagely, skidded perilously, and headed in the other direction. It was bitterly cold, but he was hardly conscious of it; was conscious of nothing but a seething impatience, a sort of breathless anticipation. Again he looked at his watch, for it seemed as if he had been driving back and forth for days. It was only nine-thirty.

As he passed the von Essen house again he peered at it eagerly. There were few lights, and those dim. The place was quieting down for the night; servants would be in bed, or drowsily waiting for their master’s return. Soon it would be safe to make the attempt.

After another turn or so he halted his car facing toward his own home and at a little distance from the entrance to the von Essen grounds. Snapping on his dimmers, he leaped out and walked across the street to the deeply shaded area midway between street lights. Carefully he looked in either direction; no pedestrians were visible; the street was clear save for a distant automobile approaching from the city. He hesitated a second, then stepped from the walk into the sheltering shrubbery. With caution he dodged from dark spot to dark spot, taking pleasure in his subtle approach with a certain boyishness, a certain pretense—as if he were playing Indian. The snow reached well above his ankles, and at each step its brittle crust crackled and crashed alarmingly, but none seemed to take the alarm.

He rounded the big house in safety and stood under the window Hildegarde had described as her own. There was no light. Potter crept behind a snow-shrouded bush and scrutinized it, rising cautiously to his feet and standing for an instant exposed to view. If Hildegarde were watching alertly, he said to himself, she would surely see him. He waited. In a moment he could hear the window open.

“Potter,” whispered Hildegarde.

“Here,” he said.

She disappeared, but came back presently, holding out something black and bulky. “My bag,” she whispered. “Catch!”

He caught it and deposited it on the snow; then, while he wondered how he was to get her down from her room, she climbed upon the window-sill, lowered herself until she hung by her fingers.

“Careful.” he said, with incautious loudness. “Wait.”

But Hildegarde was driven by the same impatience as himself. There would be no waiting for her, no caution. She loosed her hold and dropped, falling into a little heap in the snow. Potter raised her quickly.

“Hurt?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “of course not.”

He picked up her bag. “My car’s just across the street,” he said, and they walked hurriedly toward it.

As they approached a black blot made by the shadow of a clump or ornamental shrubbery, the dark figure of a man arose, almost from under their feet, and scurried away. Potter’s impulse was to give chase, but Hildegarde clutched his arm.

“What in thunder?” Potter burst out, angrily. “Somebody spying on us.”

“Not on us,” said Hildegarde, bitterly.

“Of course it was on us. He probably saw me sneak into the grounds, and sneaked after to see what I was up to.... I wonder why.”

Hildegarde knew it was not a man who had followed Potter, but was undoubtedly an individual set by sinister interests to keep watch on her father and her father’s house, but she held her peace. It was a thing shameful to her and one she would keep locked in the secret places of her heart. It strengthened her courage and her resolution. She was running away from her father because his proximity was contaminating. “My father,” she was thinking. “He’s a traitor, a plotter.”

They hastened on, and both breathed in relief as Potter assisted Hildegarde into his car. He pressed the starter button and the cold engine started with a staccato, uneven, protesting roar.

“Where are we going?” Hildegarde asked.

Potter shifted gears before he replied; then, of a sudden, it occurred to him that what he had to say presented some difficulties, and was, perhaps, of a nature to startle his companion.

“Garde,” he said, using for the first time the diminutive of her name, “you and I have been through some things together.”

“Yes, indeed,” she said.

“I think they’ve made us better acquainted than—than meeting at a thundering lot of parties and dances and that sort of thing. Don’t you feel that you know me pretty well?”

“Do you think I’d have written that note to you if I didn’t?”

He felt relieved. To be sure she must feel that way. She must think well of him, must have a certain confidence in him, to have summoned him in this emergency.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, a bit anxiously.

“To my house,” he said, and felt her start of astonishment. “I’ll tell you why.” He hesitated, and then blurted out, impetuously: “It’s because I love you, Garde. I want you to marry me. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about me that way, but I’ve been bursting with you.... Yesterday morning when you came into the hangar I—I came pretty close to taking you into my arms right then.... I had to hold back.... The things that have happened to us—doesn’t it seem as if it were intended we should marry?... That’s why I’m taking you home. Mother will be waiting up—”

“Does she know?” Hildegarde asked, suddenly.

“No. I asked her to wait up for me.... I’ll leave you there and tear out after the license and a minister. I can get the license fixed up all right. The clerk is a friend of mine. And I’ll kidnap a minister.”

“Don’t I have anything to say about it?”

He stopped, somewhat aghast. He had overrun his story.

“Won’t you marry me?” he said, eagerly. “I love you.... I’ll make you happy.”

It was all unexpected to Hildegarde. She had not reckoned on this. Not that she had never considered Potter as a possible husband. What girl could have taken so important a part in the happenings of a man’s life without at least considering that outcome? She liked him, liked him exceedingly, but she had not thought further than that. She had regarded him more in the light of an adventure; of an exciting pal, perhaps.... Now she regarded him from a far different point of view. He was asking her to marry him—to turn her running away from home into an elopement. Some girls might have been carried off their feet by the romance of it, but not so Hildegarde. She was not easily swept from her equilibrium.... She was not calm and cool as she considered; she was excited, vibrant with stirred emotions, yet she could think collectedly.

She liked him, she told herself, liked him very well indeed. Perhaps that was love. She doubted it, but then she might be mistaken. At any rate, he would be a bully companion, and he was, she felt, trustworthy; she could marry him with confidence that he would be good to her, gentle with her, chivalrous toward her.... He was rich. That was but a passing thought, but it was present. He was handsome, a husband to exhibit with pride.... And marriage with him would solve her problem. She could depend upon him to hold her safe from her father. He would be a sure refuge in her emergency.... And what other refuge was there? She was penniless. She would be alone in the world.... Unmistakably she liked Potter.

“Are you angry?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Do you mean— Will you marry me? To-night?”

“Yes,” she replied.

One arm sufficed to guide the car, while with the other he crushed her to him, panting, protesting, and kissed her averted cheek.

“Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t!” It was a shock to her; it was reality, yet, somehow, she was not affronted, was more startled than displeased.

“You love me,” he insisted. “Let me hear you say it.”

“I—don’t know,” she said. “Everything is so—so confused. Everything is happening—”

“Of course,” he said, gently. “I’ll behave myself.... But you’ve got to love me,” he said, with determination. “We were meant to love each other.”

They ran up the long driveway and stopped at the carriage-door of Potter’s house. He leaped to the step and lifted her out in his arms, and as she felt the strength of them, the promise of protection in them, she was conscious of a pleasant contentment, of something more, perhaps. She looked up into Potter’s face and smiled, nor did she avert her head as he pressed his lips to hers. Yes, perhaps this was love. Certainly she was moved, stirred by this young man. If it were not love itself, she thought, somewhat vaguely, it gave promise of opening into love.

Mrs. Waite was sitting up for her son as she had promised. When Potter and Hildegarde entered the room she arose, surprised, but repressing her surprise.

“Mother,” said Potter, “you know Garde, of course.... We’re going to be married to-night—here. That’s why I asked you to sit up.... I’ll leave her with you while I run out to fetch a parson.”

Hildegarde waited, looking at Mrs. Waite with reserve, expectancy. The older woman stepped forward and took the girl in her arms as her own mother might have done. “My dear,” she said. Then, “Tell me about it, son.”

Potter told all there was to tell, impetuously. His mother watched him tenderly, understandingly, as his face mirrored the emotions that moved within him. She sympathized with her son, loved her son.... And she knew, as she watched him, that he loved this girl, that it was no mere fascination leading him headlong into ill-considered marriage.

“And you,” she said, holding Hildegarde at arm’s-length, “do you love my son?”

Hildegarde looked back into those sympathetic eyes, and spoke honestly. “I—don’t know,” she said.

Mrs. Waite nodded. “No one knows you have carried her away?” she asked Potter.

“No,” he said. “Nobody in the house, anyhow.”

“That is good. Perhaps she can get back as unseen as she came. Because, son, you must take her home again....” She held up her hand as he would have protested with heat. “Listen, children.... I will welcome you as a daughter, Garde,” she said, simply. “You will be very dear to me—if you really want to be my daughter when you have had time to consider.... But you haven’t. You’re marrying Potter because there seems to be no other way out of it.... That is bad, for him and for you.... I hope you can come to love him as he loves you. But whether you love him or not, most of all if you do love him, you must go home. It never does to start wrong; you must start clean.... Let us consider. I’m sure you wouldn’t marry Potter until you know whether you love him.”

“I’d do anything to get away from my father,” Hildegarde said, passionately.

“Potter,” said his mother, “you’ve been a wild boy, but you’ve always been honest with me—and tender with me.... For all that has been said about you, I’ve never heard any one say that you didn’t play fair. People have always said that Potter Waite wasn’t the man to cheat or to take advantage.... You’re not being a good sportsman now. You’re cheating—cheating Garde, cheating yourself, cheating Mr. von Essen.... If you married Garde in this way it would be a story to follow her for years. It would be twisted, falsely told, garbled. You would both know bitter regret over it. And it isn’t necessary.... Hildegarde wants to leave her home. Well, let her leave it without the breath of scandal following. It will mean only a little patience, only a little waiting.... Take her home, son; then go to-morrow to Mr. von Essen, and ask his permission for your marriage.”

“He would refuse,” said Potter.

“If he does,” said Mrs. Waite, firmly, “you may bring Garde back to me whenever you are ready.... He must be given the chance.... But most important of all, son, Garde must be given time to know her mind. To-night she doesn’t love you. She has been honest enough to say so.... I know that hurts, son.... If she doesn’t love you, you must give her a fair chance for happiness—you must win her.... You’re not being a sportsman, son.”

“But, mother—”

“Would you marry a girl who doesn’t love you?”

He hesitated; he was unhappy, disturbed. “No,” he said, “but—”

“But she doesn’t know. Is it right to marry her before she knows?”

Potter looked at Hildegarde appealingly, but she dropped her eyes evasively.... He understood. His mother was right, and Hildegarde interpreted rightly the deep breath which he drew.

“I sha’n’t go home again. You sha’n’t make me.”

“You must, my dear,” said Mrs. Waite. “There is no other place for you to go. You must see that you can’t stay here.... It is impossible for you to go anywhere else.... It won’t be for long, Garde, if you care—not if you love him. But you must go home to-night.”

“I sha’n’t. I’ll never sleep under the same roof with father again.... Oh, you don’t know everything; you don’t know....” She could not finish. She stopped, too proud to beg, feeling her utter helplessness.... There was no place to go if she could not stay here. She was beaten. Fiercely she turned from Mrs. Waite to Potter. “Come,” she said, furiously.

“Won’t you kiss me good night, dear?” Mrs. Waite said, gently.

Garde refused to reply, but flung out of the room, followed by Potter. She would not allow him to help her into the car, and sat in moody silence as he started the engine.

“You don’t have to mind her,” she said, suddenly. “You’re not tied to her apron-strings.... If I’m willing to marry you, that’s my affair.... I sha’n’t go home.... We can go and be married some place.”

“No,” he said, heavily. “Mother was right.... If you loved me—”

She could not say it; even to purchase her freedom from the home she hated, she could not bring herself to declare a love she did not feel. Indeed, at the moment, she believed she hated Potter, hated his mother for her interference.... She was distracted.

“You refuse to marry me?” she demanded.

“I’ll come for you to-morrow. I’ll ask your father for you, and if he won’t give you to me I’ll break in and take you ... if you love me.”

“That’s your final word?” Her voice was sharp, metallic.

He nodded miserably.

She did not speak again until they stood upon the piazza of her own house and she was about to open the door. Suddenly she turned on him, blazing with white fury. “You coward!” she said, hoarsely. “You quitter.... You contemptible quitter.... Oh, how I despise you!”

It seemed as if she could not contain herself. Suddenly she lifted her little hand and struck him across the mouth; then, sobbing with rage, she snatched open the door and disappeared within.

Potter stood rigid, livid.... For a minute, two minutes, he remained without motion; then slowly, very slowly, he turned away from the door and made his way to his motor.

CHAPTER XI

Potter Waite’s outlook upon life had been modified by his accident and by that period of enforced reflection which followed it; it was again modified by the occurrences of the night when he had first helped Hildegarde von Essen to escape from her home and then had compelled her to return to it. His first emotion had been one of seething rage; this was succeeded by a bitter feeling that he had been cheated, and he brooded. He had been cheated because he had given his love to Hildegarde and received in return for it a blow and her scorn. He did not stop to think. He did not consider that she was headstrong, impetuous as himself; he did not consider the suddenness, perhaps the untimeliness, of the proffer of his love. He did not comprehend that Hildegarde’s words and actions were the result of black disappointment; that her anger with him was to have been expected of a girl such as she, frustrated by him in a design which she believed to be vital. Instead of weighing and reflecting he plunged into a sinister mood.

He became morose; the old charm and magnetism seemed to have deserted him, and the men who worked with him wondered what could have happened to their young employer. A great part of his conduct at this time was due to youth—to youth hugging to its bosom and fondling a hurt to its pride. If he had been indifferent to his friends before, he avoided them now, made them feel unwelcome. And he worked.... He drove himself, as a man will drive himself who has riding upon his back the hag of heartburning. There is no bitterness in the world like that of sweetness turned to aloes, and the taste of it was constantly in his mouth.

He threw himself into his work, not with gay enthusiasm, but with the smoldering fanaticism of a Savonarola. There could be no middle ground for him, no moderation. He thought and dreamed aeroplanes before because he loved the work, because he saw the value of the work, and because he believed enthusiastically that his country required the work of him. Now he steeped himself in the atmosphere and technicalities of the aeroplane to crowd Hildegarde von Essen out of his thought. Perhaps now he worked more rigorously, worked merciless hours, but it is doubtful if he worked more valuably.

He went to Washington, where the Signal Corps received him as a friend and gave him hours that were near to pleasantness. Major Craig gave up his time to Potter, encouraging him, inspiring him, congratulating him. Here the attitude was the antithesis of the attitude manifested toward him by those with whom he came into contact in Detroit. He saw all there was to be seen of the Signal Corps’ work and plans and hopes, and was made to feel himself an important factor. The officers who were his companions liked him, but wondered if he returned their liking. This was because Potter was for business and for business alone; he held himself reservedly aloof from the personal side. From Washington, with imperative credentials, he visited such of the aeroplane factories as were worth while and studied what was in them to study. He was thrown into contact with an Englishman of the Royal Flying Corps, recovering from wounds received in air-battle with a German ’plane, and from this man of real experience he learned much of value regarding battle conditions, and what an aeroplane must be capable of to do its duty.

These matters consumed weeks, but the time expended returned its full measure of value.

When he came home again the world was farther ahead by much with its grim business of war; the country itself was in a new stage of its transition, and unrest, together with a growing realization of the duties and perils of the position of the United States, was apparent in the minds of thinking men. Germany’s supreme effort to crush France at Verdun was in progress, but staggering now. The Toledo blade was proving itself able to cope with the sledgehammer. At home there was reason to be depressed. Military preparedness seemed doomed to failure; Secretary Garrison had resigned in protest—and as if in rebuke for our backwardness and shortness of vision, our very borders were desecrated by contemptible Mexican bandits which we were not in a state to punish. Pershing’s futile invasion of Mexico in pursuit of Villa was in progress, and disquieting rumors were filling the country. The country was beginning to seethe with the approaching presidential campaign.... It was spring, and summer drew near.

The talk on the streets, in hotels, in the clubs of Detroit, was all of Mexico now; bets were heard here and there as to whether Pershing would capture Villa, and sporting wiseacres offered odds on the fugitive. When the bearing of European events upon America were discussed the conversation was generally without form and void. The common attitude was that we would not be drawn into it, but why we would not, or how we would be kept out, or what the whole significance of matters might be, nobody seemed to know. There was a deal of bewilderment in those days, not a little smug complacency and asinine confidence in our immunity to such a disease as war. Confused thinking was the rule, and the clearest-headed could but grope and guess and find such comfort as he could in hopes for the best. If ever a nation in the history of the world was perplexed, baffled, had not, in the phrase of the street, the least notion where it was at, then the United States was such a nation in those spring days of 1916.

The nation did not stand where it had stood a year before; there had been advances, imperceptible, perhaps, to one not a close observer of popular phenomena. But opinion against Germany was more solidified; irritation was growing; everywhere you encountered an attitude which seemed to say, “Germany doesn’t want to crowd us too far.” Yet you would have had to search long and carefully to find a man who wanted war. Of course there was Roosevelt, but, then, what else would one expect of Roosevelt?

Detroit, representing the attitude of the Middle West, rather sneered at the seaboard for its nervousness. New York had the jumps, one was told. In New York people were really excited about the situation. Detroit laughed. A thousand miles lay between her and tidewater; she had no reason to sit up nights worrying about the arrival of a hostile fleet. She was safe, knew she was safe, and saw no reason why anybody else should worry. She was safe, and she was growing richer every time the hands circled the clock. New York was never going to bully nor frighten Detroit into any war-hysteria.

Potter was no more certain of future events than the rest; but he was different in this, that he was for insuring our property, as it were. There was a chance, a remote chance, possibly, of the worst happening. Potter was getting ready for that worst—and if it failed to materialize, so much the better.

He was living at the new Detroit Athletic Club, that monument erected to Detroit’s swiftly acquired wealth. His family was away, the Grossepoint house closed. Here at the club he encountered the best of Detroit’s opinion, and the worst; saw the best of that spirit which was making her the marvel city of the continent, and the worst of the consequences of her tidal wave of prosperity. Here about him was a curious blending of the conservatism and gentility of older Detroit, with the new-rich, bombastic, squandering spirit of the day. He saw millionaires whose hands had not yet had time to free themselves of the callouses of toil in the machine-shop, whose manners were the manners of the corner barroom, betting fabulous sums on the rolling of the dice, at poker, at bridge—with opponents who boasted that their ancestors had owned land in Detroit since the coming of Cadillac. He saw boys who had once earned their clothes by carrying papers chumming with boys whose wealth had come down through generations. He saw much that was creditable, splendid, of great promise; he saw some degree of that which was, perhaps, inevitable, but was nevertheless deplorable. He joined but scantily in the life of the club.

He did not see it, did not grasp the fact, but it was impossible that such men, riding on the crest of a gigantic wave of prosperity, should think far beyond themselves and the miracle that had made them what they were. They talked of the Mexican affair academically, as one talks of something in order to have something to talk about. They discussed the war with all the interest they would have shown in a championship prize-fight—and most of them with no deeper interest.... It was a world-spectacle arranged for the United States to sit by and watch—and derive immense profit from.

Here and there, fortunately, were men of broader vision, of abiding patriotism. One great manufacturer was taking a salutary step in insisting that every employee in his mammoth shops should be an American citizen; one was purchasing space in the newspapers of the country to advertise, not automobiles, but preparedness. One man had the very stationery of his firm inscribed with words which not only showed the world where he stood, but urged the world to step forth and do likewise.

Whatever advances had been made toward presenting a solid front, toward coherent thought, were due, not to something moving within, something spontaneous, some natural growth of patriotism, but to Germany. Germany was awakening America; Germany was America’s alarm-clock. Her propaganda, her bomb plots, her labor agitations, her arrogance, and her submarines were doing for America what America seemed unable to do for herself.... Germany, while willing quite another thing, was proving herself a friend to America; she was clumsily, bull-headedly, forcing America to think together and to the point; she was compelling America to think about America.... That way lay the path to patriotism.

Tom Watts and O’Mera sat at table with Potter one evening.

“Potter,” said Tom, “I’m beginning to think there’s something to this rigmarole you’ve been talking. This deal at the Mexican border has shown us up bad.... Something’s got to be done.... It got my goat, by Jove! that’s what it did. And I’ll tell you what I’m going to do—I’m going to Plattsburg this summer.”

Potter made no reply.

“It’s fierce, the state we’re in,” Tom went on. “Why, what the devil would happen if some regular nation landed an army on the coast—say a couple of hundred thousand men? By the time we got ready to fight the war’d be over with and we’d be cleaned up plenty.”

“You make me tired,” O’Mera said. “Potter with his aeroplanes, and now you with your Plattsburg.” He looked up and nodded across the room to Cantor. “Your snappy little friend is running around a lot with that man Cantor,” he said to Potter.

“Who do you mean?”

“The von Essen girl.... She wants to go easy with that boy—he plays marbles for keeps.... Rides with him, dances with him, eats with him. None of my damn business.”

“It isn’t,” said Potter, sharply.

O’Mera failed to notice, but launched into anecdotes of Cantor’s adventures with various women, each adventure cited to demonstrate a certain cold-bloodedness in the dealings of the man with the other sex—and a degree of success with the other sex which Potter had not suspected.

“It’s his principal occupation,” O’Mera said; “he has some other one, I guess, but I’m darned if I’ve ever figured it out. Handles money careless, too. Must clean up somehow.”

Cantor merely appeared in the door of the main dining-room, and, after looking around, stepped back into the corridor. Watts drew back his chair.

“Let’s go down and knock the balls around awhile,” he suggested.

“Got a date,” said O’Mera.

“Come on, Potter.... I want to talk to you a bit.”

Potter nodded and got to his feet. They walked between the tables to the door and out into the handsome hallway. Coming toward them from the elevator they saw Cantor and a girl; he had evidently been waiting for her to come up from the ladies’ quarters below. It was Hildegarde von Essen.

Potter stiffened, but did not pause. It was the first time he had seen her since she struck him across the face and flung herself into the house the night her flight was turned into a fiasco. She was unchanged; she was the same slender, daring, challenging, keen creature as before. Something she was saying compelled a laugh from Cantor. Then he saw Potter and smiled with surprise.

“Why, Waite, when did you get back?” he asked, and moved forward with hand outstretched. Potter was walking toward him. Hildegarde’s eyes were upon him; he could feel them, but did not return her look. He dared not. “I’m mighty glad to see you,” Cantor said, as Potter took his hand. “Dined?... Miss von Essen and I are just going to have a bite. Won’t you join us? I’m sure Miss von Essen seconds that.” He turned toward her, and something in her look, her bearing, startled him. She had grown pale, but her eyes glittered; she was staring at Potter savagely.

“Most certainly I do not,” she said, distinctly, and turned her back.

Cantor looked at Potter and lifted his brows. There was the merest hint of a smile, a sardonic smile. “What’s up?” he asked, under his breath. “See you later, then.”

Potter walked down-stairs in grim silence, his two friends eying him wonderingly, neither caring to speak. The Potter Waite they knew was accustomed in such circumstances to prove unpleasant.

“So long,” O’Mera said, hastily, at the foot of the stairs, and disappeared toward the coat-room.

“Guess I won’t play billiards,” Potter said, slowly, to Watts. There was no other word. He turned abruptly away, and Tom gazed after him, wondering what it was all about. “Huh!” he ejaculated. “What in thunder?”

Up-stairs, Cantor was equally nonplussed. Hildegarde walked to their table, drew back her chair, and was about to sit down. Then she pushed the chair away from her passionately, pushed it so that it fell to the floor noisily.

“I don’t want to eat,” she said. “I’m going home.”

“But, Miss von Essen—”

“I’m going home, and I’m going alone.... I’m going now.”

“What is it? What have I done to offend—”

“Nothing,” she said, ungraciously, and began to walk toward the door. He followed her.

“I said I was going alone,” she said, under her breath.

“But—”

She faced him suddenly, flamed out at him. “Go away,” she said. “Have I got to shout at you?... I don’t want you.... I don’t want anybody.... I’m going home.”

“I will see you to your car,” he said. “Careful. People are looking at us.”

She walked rapidly to the elevator; it was as though she tried to run away from him, but he followed closely. They descended, and she disappeared into the dressing-room.

“Miss von Essen’s car,” Cantor said to the doorman.

Presently she reappeared, and was about to leave the club, it appeared, without noticing his presence. He followed her outside and opened the door of her car. She stepped in and flung herself upon the seat. “Home,” she said, but did not look at Cantor. He shrugged his shoulders and closed the door.

He did not go again to the table that had been prepared for himself and Hildegarde, but entered the grill, where he selected a table in a distant corner, where he sat biting his lip.

“She’s in love with him,” he said to himself with the air of a man making a mathematical calculation. “Um!... All the better, perhaps.... Something may be made of it.”

CHAPTER XII

Hildegarde had acquired the habit of stepping softly as she went about her father’s house; of stopping to listen before she turned corners or entered rooms. Every activity of the house she scrutinized with suspicion. She felt that affairs went forward there under the surface which she could only guess at but could not detect. There was a sort of melodrama about her situation that keyed her up. She would never admit it, but, nevertheless, there were times when she really enjoyed herself. There was no air of mystery about the place, but she knew mystery was there. She knew there were servants waiting upon her who were set there to keep watchful eyes upon her father; perhaps they carried on at the same time other and more sinister occupations. Her father seemed to go about his usual pursuits without interruption, but she believed there were interruptions. Every time a fire worked its destruction, every time the papers reported the havoc of an explosion, she wondered if her father’s hand had been in it. But she saw nothing to evidence his guilt. Simply and baldly, she saw nothing. She only felt.

Ever since that night of climaxes she had hoped to discover the identity of the man who had forced her father, not against his honorable scruples, but against his fears, to assume a part in Germany’s secret war against the United States, but his identity was never hinted at by anything that came to her ears or eyes. Once, on some pretext, she had rummaged the basements of the house to see if she could find the explosives whose presence had been hinted at. She found nothing.

She listened for and searched for things she did not want to find. “If I should find something,” she asked herself, “what would I do about it?” There was a problem indeed. One may despise a parent, but, nevertheless, parenthood exists. She loved the memory of her mother, and Herman von Essen had dominated her mother’s life. Possibly her mother had loved him. Surely she had loved him for an interval. Considerations of this sort reared themselves; but perhaps the major consideration was her horror of disgrace—her horror of being shown to the world as the daughter of a man guilty of treachery toward his country. Perhaps she was not the only daughter of German parentage who faced such a problem in those days.

As a natural opposite of her father, she had felt loyalty where he exhibited disloyalty; his attitude toward the United States had compelled her to a love for her country which otherwise might have lain as dormant as it seemed to lie in the majority of men and women about her. But her father quickened it, and she nursed it. It was not in her to do things by halves, and inevitably she became fiercely, flamingly patriotic.... Perhaps girlishly patriotic; patriotic with immature enthusiasm.... She brooded and dreamed. She saw herself frustrating her father’s designs—but always without betraying him. She pictured herself discovering plots, and bringing them to futility with clever counter-plots. She pictured herself in possession of indisputable evidence of her father’s guilt, and would sit painting to herself scenes in which she confronted him with it, compelled him to grovel for mercy, and wrung from him promises to abandon his sinister enterprises. But though she spied with what cleverness for spying was in her, she hit upon nothing tangible. Almost she came to believe there was nothing tangible to discover.

The thing was never absent from her mind. How could it be? One cannot whistle away fear, shame, the sense of impending calamity which has its birth in such certain insecurity as was hers. When a nature, reckless, turbulent, headstrong—and feminine—is moved by such emotions as hatred, terror, black doubt, love of country, all conflicting, a dance, a game of cards, a novel, cannot bring forgetfulness nor ease of mind. It was wearing on her, chafing at those restraints which were naturally irksome to her. Hildegarde was being modified, as Potter had been modified, but the forces that acted upon her were far different from the forces which had worked upon him. To Potter, through enforced idleness, unavoidable thought, had come certainty and sureness of purpose, darkened and made saturnine through these last months by love that had come down about him in ruins. To Hildegarde came only more uncertainty, more anguish of mind. There was no light ahead; nothing was clear before her. The strain she underwent, the constant pressure of suspense, the tenseness of a most singular precariousness, all pulled her this way and that. How the thing would end with her none could say. It would change her; another woman would result, but what sort of woman? The answer depended upon the innate strength of her soul, the sturdiness of such virtues as resided in her.

For weeks after her brief encounter with Potter outside the dining-room of the Athletic Club he insisted upon obtruding himself into her thoughts and multiplying her perplexities. She herself, if she had been given to introspection, could not have told what were her sentiments toward him. She was very angry with him; that persisted. But the meeting with him had given her a shock she did not suspect it would give her. It had upset her. After she declined so sharply to sit at table with him it had seemed to her she had to get away from that spot; had to be alone, could not bear the presence of a human being. She did not want to hide away to think about him; that was the thing she least desired to do. She would have told you she never wanted to see him or be reminded of him again. But she reminded herself of him. There were times when she really believed he had assumed such importance in her considerations because she hated him. That, she fancied, would account for it, for she was forced to acknowledge that he was important. At other times she was not so certain of hatred; vivid recollections of pleasant, glowing moments spent with him would come to her. Again and again she saw the look that was in his eyes at their unexpected meeting. The memory of that look disturbed and accused her, but she would not admit the accusation. Against her will she lived over again her flight from the house; Potter’s offer of love and marriage, and her reception of it.... She would have married him that night—without love; it was not in her at that time to understand why he had acted as he had; why he should have declined to marry her without her love coming to him as a part of the transaction. She liked to fancy herself scorned and affronted, but in her heart she knew she had not been scorned nor affronted. She had accepted Cantor’s attentions because, with a sort of childish petulance, she imagined it would hurt Potter.

Her reason was a double one, perhaps a triple one. Potter was the first consideration; then, second in importance, she must get away from the house, be away from it frequently, be amused, excited. Cantor offered amusement and excitement. She was not so inexperienced that she failed to perceive early in their intimacy that Cantor was not the safest of escorts, that he might, perhaps, prove to be more exciting than amusing, and more dangerous than either. That feature of it rather egged her on. In her state of mind she courted the risks she saw, and dared them. It provided the element of contest her restlessness demanded. She took on Cantor as she would have taken on a game of chess, knowing or suspecting the chances of winning or losing.... And she found him fascinating, a skilled cavalier, a delightful companion—but a watchful, ready companion, not likely to pass over the opportunities of the game. It required all her wit, her ready impertinence, to hold the man at arm’s-length.

On the Fourth of July she drove with Cantor to the Bloomfield Hills Country Club, adjacent to the beautiful little lakes of Oakland County, distant some twenty-odd miles from Detroit. There they lunched and dined and played golf. In the evening there were to be dancing and fireworks, but a sudden mood seized Hildegarde, before the evening’s entertainment was well begun, to go home. She could not account for it herself. Simply she wanted to go home, and wanting to go, she insisted upon being taken. Cantor discovered that there was no arguing with her.

They drove along the country road to Woodward Avenue, and through Birmingham, rapidly spreading Royal Oak, Highland Park, that had grown from a distant country village to a considerable city perched upon Detroit’s very shoulder—on down the broad avenue which had, but a few years before, known neither pavement nor street-car. Through miles upon miles of the most convincing evidences of the city’s miraculous growth they drove—and for the most part in silence. Endless rows of fine residences where, as a little girl, she had seen meadows and wheat-fields, did not now interest her.... She wanted to be alone, alone in the dark. She wanted to crouch in her room and to endeavor to compel her brain to cease from thinking.

As they approached the Boulevard she became conscious of a tremendous glow in the sky toward the west, a glow that seemed to rise, to pulsate, to bound and leap fitfully. Cantor saw it, too, and slackened speed. His lips were drawn; every now and then he moistened them with his tongue, and his eyes glowed with repressed excitement.

“It’s a fire,” said Hildegarde, with interest awakened. There was something about a big fire that fitted into her mood. “Let’s drive across the Boulevard and see.”

“We’ll only get into a mob,” he protested.

“Never mind. We’ll take that chance.”

“But, Miss von Essen, we may get shut off there and held up for hours.”

“You needn’t worry, if I don’t,” she said, sharply.

Cantor appeared more unwilling to obey her than a mere fear of delay could easily account for. One might have said that the region of the fire was one he very obviously wished to avoid, but he obeyed, nevertheless.

As they drew nearer and were able to guess at the locality of the fire Hildegarde said under her breath: “The Waite Motor Company—it is about there. Can that be it?”

“I don’t imagine so,” Cantor said, tensely; “their buildings are fire-proof, I’ve heard.”

“But it is,” Hildegarde insisted. “I’m sure it is. Hurry! It will be a tremendous fire. I want to see it.”

They turned and turned again. Before them lay the great mass of the Waite Motor Company’s plant, silhouetted against an eye-blasting inferno of roaring flame. The fire seemed to be not in the motor-plant, but to the rear of it.... They turned, made their way through crowds of people, avoided reinforcements of fire apparatus, and arrived at a point where the conflagration lay before them.

“It seems to be a lot of sheds and things,” Hildegarde said. Then, speaking to a police officer, she asked what was burning.

“Temporary buildings of the motor company,” he said. “They were put up this spring as warehouses. They tell me they were filled with motor-trucks for the Allies, hundreds of ’em—and with parts and supplies.”

“Fireworks started it, I suppose,” said Cantor, harshly.

“I don’t know.... Maybe so, but there’s a heap of things happening lately that fireworks hain’t got anythin’ to do with. Them Germans....”

“Nonsense!” said Cantor, vehemently.

“It isn’t nonsense,” Hildegarde said, sharply. “They could lay it on the fireworks. That’s why they did it to-day. I—” She stopped short and bit her lip.

An ambulance came forcing its way through the crowd, to be stopped close beside Hildegarde and Cantor.

“Oh,” she said, “some one’s hurt.... See who it is. Please do.” She turned to the policeman. “Won’t you ask who is hurt, please?”

The officer was obliging. He made his way to the ambulance, assisted in making a path for it to proceed, and then returned to the car.

“One of the watchmen,” he said. “Ambulance doctor says he was knocked on the head.... Hurt bad. Says it looks like somebody hit him a nasty lick. Skull’s cracked.”

Hildegarde shuddered. “Murder, too,” she whispered. Then: “I’ve seen all I want.... Let’s go home.”

They drove southward to Jefferson Avenue and eastward to the von Essen residence.... A car preceded them through the entrance and into the grounds. Hildegarde watched it, wondered who it could be. It stopped just before them and a man stepped out; he wavered, staggered, stumbled to the ground, and Hildegarde heard him cry out with pain.

She leaped from Cantor’s car and ran to the man’s side. “Who is it?” she asked, breathlessly. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

The man struggled to his feet, holding one hand with the other, and answered through his teeth, as one speaks who suffers agony.

“It’s Philip, the chauffeur, Miss von Essen. Playing with fireworks and got burnt pretty bad.” He breathed sharply.

“Come into the house quickly,” she said. “Mr. Cantor, take his arm. Help him in.”

As Cantor appeared the man started. “Steady,” Cantor said. “Steady.”

Hildegarde followed them into the house. She was frightened, she was doubtful. There was an odor about the chauffeur’s clothing which was not that of powder, nor was it exactly that of gasolene. She was sure it was kerosene.... What did that mean?

As the man entered the hall he stumbled, cried out breathlessly, and slumped forward in a faint. Cantor and Hildegarde bent over him as Herman von Essen came hurriedly out of the library.

“What’s this? What’s the matter?” he demanded, tensely.

“Nothing to alarm you,” said Cantor. “Your chauffeur got burnt a little with firecrackers, that’s all.”

Hildegarde switched on more lights as her father and Cantor carried the man to a lounge. She could see that his hands were badly burnt, but what was more startling, more significant to her, was that his lips were broken and bleeding and blood dripped from a gash in his scalp, injuries not commonly sustained through carelessness with fireworks.

She peered at her father. Manifestly he was frightened. He seemed to be looking to Cantor in a peculiar manner, not as one looks to a casual guest who is assisting in a minor emergency. Hildegarde wondered at that look. The man jerked convulsively, struggled to sit up.

“Leggo!” he said, hoarsely. “Leggo!” Then he saw and recognized Cantor. “Good job—” he began, and then stopped suddenly, peering craftily at Hildegarde. “Good job it wasn’t anythin’ but a little skyrocket,” he finished.

Hildegarde was standing tense, white. “There’s blood on your coat,” she said, in a choked voice. “Where were you shooting fireworks?” she demanded, and looked from the chauffeur to her father. Her father was still looking at Cantor.

“Go to bed,” said von Essen, roughly. “You’re in the way here.”

“I would go if I were you, Miss von Essen. This isn’t a pleasant sight for you.”

“I don’t suppose that poor watchman in the ambulance was a pleasant sight, either,” she said, her eyes on the chauffeur. The man started erect.

“What’s that?... What you say?... What you mean?”

Cantor’s hand was on his arm, and Hildegarde’s eyes were sharp enough to see that his fingers crushed in savagely.

“Be still! Sit down!” he said, and the man obeyed sullenly.

“Go to bed,” von Essen said, savagely.

Hildegarde was thinking, piecing together the evidence of her eyes and ears.... Cantor.... What had he to do with this? He seemed rightly to be a part of it.... His manner when he spoke to Philip!

“Will you go to bed?” her father said, stepping toward her.

“I’m going,” she said, unsteadily, almost hysterically. Indeed, she laughed unnaturally. “But before I go—I thought you’d like to know about—another great German victory.... They’ve burned part of the Waite Motor Company—and murdered a man.... Murdered a man!...” She turned and ran up the stairs to her room.

When she was out of hearing von Essen turned savagely to his chauffeur, “What made you come here like this, you fool?”

“Where else would he go?” Cantor asked, sharply. “No harm’s done.”

“What’s this about—a murder?” von Essen asked, shakily.

“Their damn watchman jumped me—one of them,” said Philip. “Before I could let him have it he landed on me—twice.... But I got him and got him good.... For God’s sake aren’t you ever going to do anything to stop this pain in my hands?”

Von Essen was shaking flabbily; his arrogance had disappeared; his cheeks were pasty.

“You’ve got the nerve of a rabbit,” Cantor said, sneeringly.

Up-stairs, Hildegarde was listening, listening not to what was being said down-stairs, but to another conversation she had overheard months ago, the conversation between her father and a man she had never been able to identify. She was trying to hear his voice now, trying to bring the sound of it back into her ears so that she could listen to it and compare it with Cantor’s familiar voice.

CHAPTER XIII

The summer and early autumn months of the year 1916 were, perhaps, the least illumined of any period of Potter Waite’s life. It was a period of drudgery without encouragement, of restless, brooding moods, of kicking against the pricks. There were hours when he felt himself and his work to be futile, when there was imminence of his return to the old life of the bar, the cabaret, the club. With the countenance and belief of one person he could have surmounted it all easily; but neither countenance nor belief was to be had of Hildegarde von Essen. If possible, she was farther from him than ever.

If there were one element of brightness, it was his realization of a change that was taking place in his father. Potter watched it with hope, saw the gradual movement of it, and read in it a token that other men of power throughout the nation might be changing as Fabius Waite was changing. Fabius Waite was beginning to think about the United States.

It required a blow touching his own person to jar Fabius from his foundations of Middle-Western security and conservatism, but he was too big a man, too able, too sound at the heart to continue to let the personal consideration sway him. He was a man to be depended on to view affairs in their larger aspects, and to weigh them, not with respect to their bearing upon himself and his concerns, but upon the nation in which he had risen to the summit of prosperity.

The fire in his plant, of demonstrated incendiary origin, gave him the initial impetus. Potter could almost find it in his heart to rejoice at that temporary disaster.

Though the criminals were not apprehended nor identified, Fabius Waite, correctly enough, laid the fire at the door of German plotters, and he expressed himself with less moderation than was his custom.

“It’s an infernal, sneaking business,” he said to Potter, “and a government which not only sanctions, but deliberately buys and pays for, such outrages is not a civilized government. Germany has thrown its decency into the sea.”

“But,” said Potter, to egg his father on, “it’s war. Your trucks were going to fight against Germany. Hadn’t she a right to destroy them?”

“Yes, openly, with cannon, or in a belligerent country. We are not belligerent. We’re serving all the world alike. If they have the idea America will stand for this sort of thing—”

“It makes a lot of difference, father,” said Potter, a trifle impertinently, “whose dog gets kicked.”

“Eh?”

“This thing has been going on for a year or more—but it never touched the Waite Motor Company before.”

“Um!” said Fabius, eying his son and taking up his paper. From time to time during the evening he would lower his paper enough to peer over it at Potter for a moment, and at such times it seemed as if he were about to offer some remark.

From that hour Potter was able to trace a gradual alteration in his father’s attitude toward Germany and toward the war—but most of all toward the United States.

During these months Potter worked not only on the designs for his aeroplane engine, but upon collecting and preserving information of general importance to the manufacturing of complete aeroplanes in enormous quantities. With all the facilities open to a private citizen he made his inquiries. Twenty millions of feet of the finest spruce must be obtained in order that four millions of feet of perfect spruce might be selected and sawed from it for the frames of the aeroplanes. This alone was a gigantic task. He studied the matter of obtaining linen for the wings, millions of yards of it—and the best linen comes from Ireland. It was a commodity of which England could spare little. Perhaps there would appear a substitute. Potter searched for it. Then there was the matter of metal for the engine, and the staggering problem of manufacturing a score of thousands of such engines as Potter knew would be required for fighting-aeroplanes—engines light in weight, perfect in efficiency, capable of developing two hundred, perhaps two hundred and fifty, horse-power. As best he could he attacked these problems, and stood amazed and terrified by the monstrousness of them. It gave him that quivering, frightened sensation one gets from thinking on infinity.

At this time the country was learning an unrelished lesson from the mobilization of our militia for the Mexican border, from the performances of our brace of aeroplanes, and from the apparent doubtful efficiency of our machine-guns. Roosevelt was coming into his own and deserving much of his countrymen by his campaign for preparedness. War was in the air, but war with a country far different from iron Germany. It was a step, unperceived by most, but doubtless clearly perceived by the man in the White House, toward a day of greater preparations. Public prints were demanding that we take half a million men and sweep through Mexico, janitor-like, to effect a cleansing. The Carrizal incident lit a dangerous flame. The arrival of Germany’s undersea merchant-vessel, the Deutschland, caused a wave of admiration for Germany’s persistency and inventiveness to sweep across the country. It was a victory of a sort calculated to arouse honest admiration. The second year of the war had closed with hope, for Verdun was beyond peradventure a gigantic victory for France, and the Somme offense had offered proofs of the possibility of shoving the entrenched German hosts toward their own frontier.... Italy had heightened the hopes at Gorizia, and Rumania had enlisted with the Allies.... November saw the ending of the Presidential campaign with the re-election of Mr. Wilson.

Even before this, Fabius Waite had traveled far. He was able in October, with the appearance of the German submarine U-53 off our coasts, and its entrance into the harbor of Newport.